Chris Whitley always played as if his life depended on it. Sometimes, as in his 2004 manifesto War Crime Blues, the emotion was so raw you could practically taste the blood on the strings of his National steel guitar. Other times it was more of a throbbing ache, as in this year’s Soft Dangerous Shores, his last dispatch as an expat in Dresden, Germany. He came home to die in Houston, Texas, where he was born in 1960, and passed on November 20, ...