Ryan Lee Crosby may not be from Mississippi, or anywhere near it, but that didn’t stop the under-45-year-old Rhode Islander from packing up his bags and equipment and heading there to record his latest album At the Blue Front, due out in August. Here’s the first single from that album, a haunting take on the popular blues classic “Catfish” that, like the rest of the album, was recorded at Bentonia’s Blue Front Cafe, a juke joint dating back to 1948 and owned and operated by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, one of the last living links to the Bentonia-style of blues made famous by Skip James (who performed often at the Blue Front).
You can watch and hear the Lou Reed-sounding Crosby trading verses and licks with the 77-year-old Holmes (as they pass the microphone back and forth for their respective vocal parts) in this video, on which they’re also joined by Jay Scheffler on harmonica and Grant Smith on calabash, a West African drum fashioned from a gourd that adds some neat texture, but it’s hard not to love the entrancing sound of that 12-string guitar from Crosby in combination with Holmes’ 6-string!