This album has a personal sound of its own. With his raw amplified guitar sound and his straightforward voice, Mr Clarence Edwards is certainly one of the best of the Louisiana bluesmen almost ignored by history. That big record companies' talents scouts that hang around juke-joints and clubs could pass away from a guy like that is just unbelievable !
The first one who have "seen" Edwards' talent was Louisiana State University ethno-musicologist Harry Oster who recorded a few field tracks from him with his brother Cornelius and fiddler Butch Cage between 1959 and 1961.
Clarence Edwards was born in 1933 in a small village just north of Baton Rouge, and was about 20 when he started to perform in juke-joints and clubs with his brother Cornelius in local bands, the Boogie Beats, then the Bluebird Kings. A life that could be dangerous sometimes : one day, after a show at a club in Baton Rouge's Alsen district, he was shot in the leg in a brawl outside the club.
In the seventies, while working in a scrapyard to earn a living (a job he kept for some thirty years), Edwards recorded again a dozen titles that were scattered in different compilations.
By the early eighties, while the disco-mania had emptied juke joints and blues clubs, bluesman Tabby Thomas opened a new club in Baton Rouge, Tabby's Blues Box, that immediately attracted all the frustrated Louisiana bluesmen and of course Edwards whose career was re-boosted, this time drawing attention from young producer-manager Stephen Coleridge who opened the doors of the national blues clubs and festivals circuit to him.
Still he had already reached the age of 57 when he was able to record a full album under his name : "Swamps The World".
This album is like a water hyacinth flower that searched for light and slipped through duckweed and waterlilies up to the surface of the swamp. It's been recorded in a couple of days in February 1990 with really excellent partners : Harmonica Red (no need to precise on which instrument !) stands out brilliantly, Michael Ward adds a vintage Louisiana country sound with his fiddle, Henry Gray's piano (and Bill Guess') brings a New Orleans touch, and the beat is solidly maintained by Antony Hardesty's great job on bass, and Lester "Pick" Delmore's on drums, helped by a few others on diverse percussion (even cardboard box !)
It alternates stimulating rocking tracks like "Stoop Down Baby", the feet-stomping "Chewing Gum", "Walking The Dog" and "I Want Somebody" or the sincere "Born With The Blues" featuring great work from Harmonica Red; and acoustic pieces like "Driving Wheel", or the shuffling "Done Got Over It" with its zydeco feel : Michael Ward's fiddle replacing the accordion over a background of clapping, washboard and guitar rhythm. As a matter of fact Edwards always used to have a fiddler on stage with him, reminding another Clarence : "Gatemouth" (except that this one played the fiddle himself).
This album, and the two that followed ("Swampin'" in 1991 and "Louisiana Swamp Blues, Vol. 4" in 1992) gained Edwards good praises from the blues community, but unfortunately, in 1993, at only 60, death robbed this growing fame from him. ■
THE live video
► At the St Louis Blues Festival in 1990 : https://youtu.be/4FyAsVAsuII
► Clarence Edwards (guitar & vocal), brother Cornelius Edwards (guitar) and James "Butch" Cage (fiddle), recorded near Baton Rouge by Dr. Harry Oster in 1960 :
→ "Mean Old Frisco" : https://youtu.be/_H0tnNnlC7g
→ "Smokestack Lightnin'" : https://youtu.be/Ck4bOiJvfrw
→ "Stack O' Dollars" : https://youtu.be/sbtTeP95A3o or https://youtu.be/YNFpdOFAknM
→ "Thousand Miles From Nowhere" : https://youtu.be/AUtDsHqpd_0
→ "How Many More Years" : https://youtu.be/pcLTW6Rfdh4
→ "Hear That Rumbling": https://youtu.be/JLD1IYd0fUA
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