Jessie Mae Hemphill - Get Right Blues (2003)

 > The album

The lady of the hills 

Hypnotically fascinating ! This woman was something else ! She had a unique vocal imprint and a very personal way of uttering her lyrics as if she had missing teeth (which didn't show on her pictures, but I suspect she was wearing dentures, even decorated with fancy inlays !) and/or was affected by some kind of speech impediment. Her guitar boogies down all the way reminding of course John Lee Hooker in his early recordings. Her plain guitar style in reality hides a solid picking technique. Her songs are filled with sorrow and despair, reflecting the hard Mississippi country life inherited from the "forty acres and a mule" times of slavery liberation (which as everybody knows lasted a good century). This dark side of History can be felt in her poignant singing.

Born in 1923, Jessie Mae Hemphill had indeed known, through her family descent or by herself, the hard path from Lincoln to the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. When this one was assassinated in 1968, she was already around 45. Ten years later, university ethno-musicologist and blues researcher Dr. David Evans started to record samples of her mix of folk-blues and spirituals.

She was from a small village between Como and Senatobia in the northern Mississippi hills country, east of the Delta. Her blind grandfather Sid Hemphill, the son of a slave fiddle player, was an extraordinary musician. He could craft instruments and play fiddle, banjo, guitar, jaw harp, quills (a kind of local panpipes), cane fife, piano, organ…, He also played what was called "fife and drums" music. Famous musicologist Alan Lomax did some field recordings of him in the 1940s and 1950s (*). With such a family, it's not surprising that Jessie Mae started very young to play in her grandad's band. This explains the great technicality hidden behind her apparent crude simplicity. In 1993 a stroke paralyzed her left side putting an end to her playing guitar.

Fortunately the songs gathered on this album were recorded in 1979, 1984 and 1985 by David Evans. They transport you to the rough Mississippi hills where she used to play in local or family gatherings with only her guitar and a drum gear or tambourine tied to her stomping feet. It is precisely this instrumental simplicity that emphasizes the fascinating mystery of her singular voice. Her other singularity is that she adopted electric guitar early. On this album only two tracks, recorded at the Memphis University Recording Studio in January 1984, feature a bass and drum rhythm section : "Shake Your Booty (Shake It, Baby)" and "Jessie's Love Song (Tell Me You Love Me)". All the others are performed using old traditional instruments : diddley bow (**), hand or foot tambourine, ankle bells, hat box, bass or snare drum. "Lord, Help The Poor And Needy" is even performed with just a simple tambourine.

Her repertoire is primarily made of self-written love songs about loss and rejection, or sometimes of spirituals. Four tracks only are covers ("Baby, Please Don't Go", Memphis Minnie's "Honey Bee") or traditionals ("He's A Mighty Good Leader", "Get Right, Church"). And once again her singular voice give them an extra tragic color.

David Evans, who did the recordings and sometimes took part on guitar himself ("Streamline Train", "Baby, Please Don't Go"), took detailed notes of each take. That's how we know today what instruments Jessie Mae played on which track.

On "Go Back To Your Used To Be" JMH is on guitar and foot tambourine. On "Take Me Home With You, Baby" she uses only a diddley bow, and a hand tambourine on "Lord, Help The Poor And Needy" as already said, while on "Cowgirl Blues" she's on guitar, foot tambourine and bass drum. On "All Night Boogie (Jessie's Boogie)", she uses guitar, foot tambourine, bass drum and snare, and on "Loving In The Moonlight", guitar and foot tambourine. On "Jesus Will Fix It For You", she plays guitar without any side instrument.

This unusual instrumental combinations creates a unique sound. If it wouldn't be for the electric guitar, we could well be somewhere indeterminate between the Civil war and the first decades of the twentieth century, at the birth age of blues.

It's down-home raw, it's authentic vintage roots, it's ageless, it's deeply moving, it's beautiful.

(*) Famous ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax's 1942 historical recordings of Sid Hemphill and his band playing at a picnic outside of Sledge, Mississippi. Some songs are close to country-folk, some others to blues :  https://youtu.be/cTjA1a1CjQs

(**) The diddley bow is a single-stringed instrument which influenced the development of the blues sound. It consists of a single wire string stretched between two nails on a board over a glass bottle, which is used both as a bridge and as an amplifier. Its origins go back to Africa.

Infos & Videos
> Some rare and raw documentary videos of Jessie Mae :
- J. M. Hemphill and her guitar, 1999 : https://youtu.be/OaevRGENk3g?list=PLacBKicScak93SikgmsCH8xtVJ5V6Sv8m
- J. M. Hemphill & Friends, 2004 : https://youtu.be/dD2PNxcvlhg
- Live in 1984 : https://youtu.be/rHtVqq09Ysk
- Of peanut butter and food : J. M. Hemphill telling stories on the road : https://youtu.be/xa280JfVvro?list=PL1i5WR0OdmQGZVs6WAgprcHEb8YToIKkw
- With unidentified blind guitar partner : https://youtu.be/bSO0k32JR5Q  & https://youtu.be/joAjpNCoW2A

> Sid Hemphill's friend and band mate Lucius Smith and J. M. Hemphill discuss drums and drumming at Smith's home in Sardis, Mississippi, in 1978 (Alan Lomax Archive ) : https://youtu.be/ThO8cIvGr4o
> Big Lucky Carter & J. M. Hemphill, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1999 : https://youtu.be/u4LvkN03ePo
> R. L. Boyce visits J. M. Hemphill : https://youtu.be/DxyTE55CNmg
> Hill country fife & drum with Othar Turner, Ed Young and J. M. Hemphill, 1982 : https://youtu.be/gVzzTYzj2AQ
> With folklorist Dr. David Evans on guitar and A. J. Myers on drums at the Memphis Amphitheater in the late 1980s : https://youtu.be/Y-UIyjPoM8A

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Rockin' Dopsie, Jr. & The Zydeco Twisters - Feet Don't fail Me Now (1995)

> The album

From father to son(s)

When Alton Jay Rubin aka Rockin' Dopsie, crowned King of Zydeco, born in 1932 in Carencro, Louisiana, died in 1993 in New Orleans, three of his sons decided to perpetuate their dad's music and his band : David Rubin (aka Rockin' Dopsie, Jr.), Alton Rubin, Jr. (aka Tiger Dopsie) and Anthony Rubin (aka Anthony Dopsie) form the core of The Zydeco Twisters. Dopsie, Sr fourth and youngest son, Dwayne Rubin (aka Dwayne Dopsie), decided to go on his own with his band, the Zydeco Hellraisers.
The reviewer quoted in the presentation above has obviously mixed up father and son. Rockin' Dopsie, Sr is not present on this album, the first issued by his offspring after his death.
Rockin' Dopsie, Jr is the band leader but holds the unusual position of… washboard player ! Of course he soon learned to play accordion with his father, but switched to washboard : "I needed more mobility so I could jump up and down and do my splits, you know", he explains on his Web site. And it's true that he is a hell of a showman (see the videos listed below). His brother, Tiger Dopsie, is sitting behind the drums and keeps up the highly dancing beat, while Anthony Dopsie is in charge of the emblematic zydeco instrument : accordion.
Zydeco is a mix of blues, Acadian and American country music, R'n'B, funk and soul, all cooked à la creole in an up-beat pot and spiced with Caribbean influences coming from the West Indies across the Gulf. It's mostly a dance music, a saturday night dance hall stuff, but not only, it also features slower ballads and blues (dancers have to cool down sometimes if they want to keep dancing all night).

"Feet Don't Fail Me Now", the album, sounds very New Orleans : carnivalesque rolling drum beat and trumpet riffs. The Big Easy is honored with two successive songs : "New Orleans" with its Mardi-gras twist and the melancholic "Walking To New Orleans" ballad.
Blues holds a good space with "Worried Life Blues", "Please Come Home", "Baby What You Want Me To Do ?" and "Mountain Jack Blues" (with young brother Dwayne Dopsie on accordion).
The cajun ballad "To Nay Nay" and the up-tempo "Famous Stars (Tribute)" are sung in creole french (a language hardly understandable even by French people themselves, but so "exotic" !). For the final track, the iconic and world famous New Orleans anthem "Jambalaya" has you jumping up for a last dance.
Dance music ? Yes indeed… but Zydeco has a characteristic sorrow underlying of its own which makes it not just a dancing music, but also a genre resulting from the long and hard historic heritage of the swamps and bayous land.

Rockin' Dopsie Jr. : https://www.rockindopsiejr.com

Infos & Live videos (all links open in a new tab)

- Rockin' Dopsie, Jr. talks about Zydeco ("a black creole music") in 2014 : > clic here

- Rockin' Dopsie, Jr, what a showman !

> At the New Orleans Oyster Fest, 2012 : > click here,  here  and  here (new tab)

> With the Marc Stone Band at Tipitina's, New Orleans, 2019 : < click here 

> At the "Acadiens et Creoles" Festival, 2014 : > click here  

> At the New Orleans French Quarter Fest, 2010, 2011 & 2015 : > click here,  here  and  here

> At the Umbria Jazz Festival, Perugia, Italy, 2001 : > click here

> At the Fultan Street Fan Fest, New Orleans, 2019 : > click here 

> At the Louisiana Music Factory JazzFest, 2009 : > click here

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Robert Finley - Age Don't Mean A Thing (2016)

> The album

Where is the blues ? Not here !

This is Robert Finley's first album, a childhood dream come true. But the carpenter-bluesman from Louisiana had to wait 62 years to see it happen though his was already a kind of legend for blues aficionados who had been lucky enough to see him play.

In 2015, Finley was recognized legally blind and had to retire from carpentry. The Music Maker Relief Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports aging traditional American music artists, discovered Finley at a gig in Arkansas. The MMRF started to help him to make a musical comeback, finding tours and concerts for him, among which a great appearance with the Music Maker Revue at the prestigious Globalfest in New York City in 2016. And thanks to that, he was offered to record a first album.

In 2019, by an incomprehensible and ridiculous twist of fate, Finley even found himself dragged in the TV singing contest America's Got Talent where he made it to the semifinals (video below) !

To go back to this first album, let's say it straight : I don't like it ! Probably for wrong reasons. I explain : though this album is clearly labeled as a R&B and soul album, still I expected something closer to blues than this recording which is not at all representative of Finley reputation as a bluesman.

I wondered why and came to a personal explanation : probably too glad to be offered the opportunity of recording an album ― at last ! ―, Finley fell on the wrong producer, Bruce Watson, who chat him up (conned, if I may dare) into doing a 100% soul record. Recorded in Memphis with members of the BO-Keys soul band, and even if Finley wrote seven of the nine featured songs, it is a soul singer singing soul music thing. Exit the blues, I think Finley has been had !

Soul music fans will probably like it ; again, I don't. So I'm not going to bother detailing each track, I wouldn't be fair. The only one who really caught my hear (and my feet) is the funky James Brown-ques "Come On". But again, it's not really blues.

Remains Finley's great soulful raucous, gritty and hoarse voice : I can only wonder what a real blues album from the beard and hat man would sound like ! Fortunately such an album came out five years later : "Sharecroppers' Son" is, according to my modest personal taste, by very far a much better album than this one...

Interviews & Live videos 

> A 83" interview with Robert Finley, after the release of his third album "Sharecropper’s Son", in 2021: > open in new tab
> A 71" audio interview in 2021 : > open in new tab
> At America's Got Talent semifinals in 2019 (go straight to minute 17"55 up to 20"30) : > open in new tab
> Finley's 1-hour set at the 2017 Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival in New Orleans : > open in new tab
> His 46" set at the "TransMusicales de Rennes" festival (France) in 2018 : > open in new tab
> Live from the New Orleans WOOZY  radio in 2019 : > open in new tab

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