Black bluesmen don’t pick up the banjo all that often, despite its prominence in the music’s rural history, but Guy Davis sees blues the way it was before it became canonized—as an indigenous folk music. Better still, he knows that folk of any stripe has to breathe and move among the people to be useful as an art form. As someone who learned his storytelling from his famous actor parents Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and his picking from Pete Seeger’s brother, the originals on his latest album feel fresh and universal, not like dusty artifacts needing translation.
On the title track—featuring Preservation Hall’s own Ben Jaffe on tuba!—he creates a character that’s a mythical representation of African-American ingenuity in between the cracks of white man’s law; he runs liquor to powerful men during Prohibition but also cocaine to the modern GOP. (He said it, I didn’t.)
It doesn’t hurt that Davis, who’s been at this off and on for decades now, also understands the art of packing a ton of emotion into a seemingly trivial detail. Witness the abuse survivor turned junkie of “She Just Wants to Be Loved,” who calls in the middle of the night for no reason at all (“She cried so hard I held the phone back”). “Wish I Hadn’t Stayed Away So Long” is not just a metaphor: “My mother died when I was on the road.” “Blackberry Kisses” invites his lover to kiss him “on the right side, on the wrong side, till I’m crosseyed.” And “Have You Ever Loved Two Women (But Couldn’t Make Up Your Mind?)” is so adept at the dramatic beats of the I-IV-V it sounds like a forgotten Delta classic.
Being a folkie also means interpreting the tradition, though, and Davis only has mixed success in that area, having more trouble shoehorning himself into “Lay Lady Lay” than even Dylan did. And nothing on Earth could turn Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” into a blues. “Little Red Rooster” sounds great in its rustic repurposing, though, and Tommy Johnson’s “Cool Drink of Water” sounds appropriately doomy in Guy’s hands. But it’s an original, “Like Sonny Did,” that really ties his two sides together, a boast of supernatural ability tied directly into his ability to carry on the blues tradition. Legitimacy as a superpower? That’s a folkie for you.
