Driving through northern Mississippi, one is immediately struck by how empty and how poor the area is. One can drive for miles along the state highways and see only a handful of small houses and farms amid the tall walls of pine trees. And yet from this underpopulated, underemployed corner of the American South came a version of the blues that sparked much of the nation's most original music. And recent albums from the North Mississippi Allstars and Jimmy 'Duck' Holmes proves this music is still throwing off sparks today.
Driving through northern Mississippi, one is immediately struck by how empty and how poor the area is. One can drive for miles along the state highways and see only a handful of small houses and farms amid the tall walls of pine trees. And yet from this underpopulated, underemployed corner of the American South came a version of the blues that sparked much of the nation’s most original music.
This music’s muscular rhythmic drive is restrained by its lack of chordal movement, and the resulting tension mirrors the conflict at the heart of human nature: the immensity of desire and the equal enormity of frustration. The isometric strain of these colliding forces creates the most powerful push-and-pull in music. That taut pressure becomes all the more disorienting when the musicians throw time signatures and bar lines out the window, allowing the downbeat to fall wherever it feels good.
They found Mississippi Fred McDowell and his protégé R.L. Burnside playing push-and-pull one-chord vamps surprisingly similar to the Malian kora players discovered a little later. Most astonishing of all, they found Othar “Otha” Turner cutting sugar-cane stalks into wind instruments and using them as the basis for call-and-response fife-and-drum bands that echoed African village ceremonies.
Luther and Sharde recreate the original call-and-response from the days when her grandfather would lead the song at one of his famous picnics. But as the rhythm section of Cody and bassist Carl Dufresne push the beat ever forward, Luther’s electric slide guitar and Sharde’s sugarcane fife lift the call-and-response into wild tangents of improvisation.
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