onurblues: Doug MacLeod

Showing posts with label Doug MacLeod. Show all posts

October 13, 2022

The Catch-back, vol. 3 : Herb Ellis - Pat Boyack - Buckwheat Zydeco - Doug MacLeod - Eddie Kirkland - Johnny Cash - Toby Walker - Lost Bayou Ramblers - Mercy - Robert Cage - Shawn Pittman & Jay Moeller

...some that deserved to be featured here…

Herb Ellis - Texas Swings (1992)

► Get the album at the usual place...

When Herb Ellis celebrates his native Texas

At times, when the violin and the guitar are talking together, it almost sounds like the unforgettable pair Django Reinhardt-Stéphane Grappelli. The two French gypsy jazz musicians actually used to play some of the standards featured here : "Undecided", "It Had To Be You", "Sweet Georgia Brown". But no, here it's Dallas native Herb Ellis with a group of fine Western swing-Country music instrumentists : pianist Floyd Domino, pedal steel guitar master Herb Remington, fiddlers Johnny Gimble and Bobby Bruce, and… Willie Nelson on guitar, not forgetting the two Tommys' rhythm section, Aslup on bass and Perkins on drums.

This 10-song all-instrumental album features mainly Western swing and jazz standards, with only two Ellis compositions. If the final "America the Beautiful" is a disputable choice in my view, the nine preceding tracks are cheerfully swinging without being wild. The exciting sound of Remington's pedal steel is sometimes reminding that of Buddy Emmons on Danny Gatton's two "Redneck Jazz Explosion" 1978 live albums, and the fiddles bring a vintage Country & Western sound on some tracks.

Continued... »

July 31, 2022

The Catch-back, vol. 2 : Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Buddy Flett - Snooky Pryor - Johnny Tucker & James Thomas - Doug MacLeod - William Clarke - Fiona Boyes

...some that deserved to be featured here...

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Down South In The Bayou Country (1972-74 / 2006)

► Get the album at the usual place...

The ex-Deputy Sheriff's country dance

Gatemouth was a surprising character, he always was where you didn't expect him to be  ! Actually, as he explained in the interview mentioned at the end of this review, he didn't appreciate much being categorized as a "bluesman". In this 1974 album for example, he was definitely in a country & western mood. He even left his guitar at home, exclusively playing fiddle, an instrument on which he excelled too (just listen to "Gate's Express" and you'll have a hot demonstration) and perfectly fitting the kind of music he chose to play, blowing his harmonica on some songs, and singing in his inimitable style.

But wait ! when Gatemouth plays country & western, he does it his way, which is not anybody else way : he's cooking a gumbo made of swamp rock, cajun waltz, creole voodoo funk, New Orleans R'n'B, Texas square dance and other Southern music ingredients to come up with his personal Gate's style vision of country & western, from "Breaux Bridge Rag" to "Gate's Express" through "Loup Garou" and "Sheriff's Barbecue"...

Continued... »

May 22, 2022

Doug MacLeod - The Utrecht Sessions (2008)

► The album

"Never play a note you don't believe"
His name sounds like one of an antique Scottish Highlander but he rather looks like an old seaman with a tanned face carved by the sun, salt and winds of the ocean. Born in 1946 in New York, he grew up in St. Louis where he started to play guitar. Affected by a bad stutter, probably caused by child abuse, he discovered that singing helped him to overcome his handicap. So he started to sing too. He later joined the Navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. On one of his off-duty time, he met a one-eyed country bluesman from Toano (Virginia) named Ernest Banks who taught him two principles that guided his life as a musician : "Never play a note you don't believe" and "Never write or sing about what you don't know about."

With George "Harmonica" Smith

Once discharged from the Navy, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met his second mentor and close friend George "Harmonica" Smith, and played with legendary bluesmen Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Lowell Fulson, Big Mama Thornton... He later relocated in Memphis where he now resides.

An extremely talented song-writer, or more properly a master story-teller in the original tradition of the blues, MacLeod has written over 300 original songs so far, among which many have been covered by numerous blues greats (Albert King, Albert Collins, Son Seals, Tabby Thomas, Joe Louis Walker, Coco Montoya, James Armstrong, Chris Thomas King, Billy Lee Riley…), and has put out an impressive discography of some forty studio & live albums since his first one in 1984. He also won a no less impressive list of music awards. As if it wasn't enough, he also co-wrote with Debra B. Schiff a mystery novel, "Murder At The Crossroads: A Blues Mystery", which came out in March 2022.

With this album uniquely composed of original songs, and recorded in Holland, a country he seems to cherish, MacLeod continues to take us back to the inter-war era of country blues when the songsters used to sing tales mixing symbolic stories and real life experiences. These twelve tracks are all magnificent and MacLeod's chiseled lyrics are full of popular rural poetry.

Two closely linked themes,  the flying of time and death, stand out  in tracks like "Horse With No Rider", the sorrowful "This Old River" with its "Midnight Special" gospel twist, the "The Long Black Train" boogie (a new version of the song released on his very first album "No Road Back Home"), the dark "The Demon's Moan", "Long Time Road" or the soul complaint "I Respectfully Decline".
The torments of love, a classic blues topic, also appear in the stomping "The Addition To Blues", the excellent out-standing folk "That Ain't Right", the swinging "Coming Your Brand New Day" and the heavily strummed "What You Got (Ain't Necessarily What You Own)". "Sheep Of A Different Color" is a protest-song in the 1960s style, while "Where You'll Find Me" has a biblical twist a la Dylan.

His very rhythmical and highly skilled acoustic steel guitar finger-picking and slide style and his stomping foot (a full percussive instrument), are discreetly backed by an upright bass (Jasper Mortier) and additional percussion (Arthur Bont, particularly excellent on the opening track where he puts out an Indian tabla or African talking drum-like sound). MacLeod's voice forged by years of performing around the world sounds very much like that of an authentic black bluesman from the Mississippi Delta or the East Coast Piedmont region.
A real jewel of an album, trust me. 
Oh… yes, I was about to forget this ! The man gives each of his guitars a name : "Spook", "Buckwheat", "Mule" and "Dubb" (his Resonator guitars), "Little Bit" (his Gibson), "Biscuit" (a Taylor 712), "Moon", "Scrapper"... ! ■

Doug MacLeod's site : https://doug-macleod.com

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