Last week, we gave you an early listen off blues legend Taj Mahal‘s newest album Labor of Love (Acoustic Sounds) in the form of a delightful “Shortnin’ Bread” that paired Mahal with the late one-armed harmonica player Neal Pattman, a song that’s described by Music Maker Relief Foundation founder Tim Duffy in the album’s liner notes as “as good as anything that was on wax in the 20s and 30s”. The rest of the dozen tracks that appear on Labor of Love, out today, are every bit as respectable and genuine, including six of Taj on his own and six more with other Music Maker artists such as John Dee Holeman, Algia Mae Hinton, Cool John Ferguson, Etta Baker, and Cootie Stark.
Among the former are such favorites as the opening “Stagger Lee” on which Mahal’s gruff, sometimes growling, vocals, airy guitar, and effects like guitar plunks to simulate the bullets that shot Billy down help to create one of the sweetest versions of the murder ballad you’ll hear; the quiet, swaying “My Creole Belle” (Mississippi John Hurt) that includes such breezy lyrics as “got a house in the country, big garden out back, Robert Johnson on the victrola, tell me what ya’ think of that”; the delightfully bouncy “Fishin’ Blues”; the beautiful guitar instrumental “Zanzibar”; the soft, slow blues of a “Spike Drivers Blues” (another from Mississippi John Hurt) that flows back and forth between harmonious observations like “Don’t the light from the moon outshine the sun, sometimes?” and an almost spoken tale relating an escape from a railworking gang; and a plodding, scratchy-voiced take on the classic “Walkin’ Blues” that, despite the song’s slowed tempo, often has Mahal fitting in words like an auctioneer.
