The modern recording studio, left unattended, can suck the atmosphere right out of the best blues music. It’s not the fact that old fieldhand blues was recorded badly that makes it sound so good, it’s that it was recorded in a spiritually harmonious place—the backporches, prison farms, and bars where these men lived, loved, worked, got in trouble and, often, died.

Kudos to Baton Rouge vet sideman John Lisi (house guitarist for the somewhat late and very lamented Tabby’s Blue Box) for being able to capture the ambience of the blues in a studio on this, his debut solo album. Part of it has to do with his mastery of the dobro, but he’s also interested in creating an otherworldly sense of frightening dislocation you can only get in the Louisiana swamp. His car broke down there once, as attested to in “Big Ol’ Broke Down Buick,” and you can smell the radiator frying as well as you can feel the mosquitoes eating you alive. (I hear you, brother. I been there.)

Lisi, ably supported here by Blues Box vets like Big Jay McNeely, Henry Gray, and Tabby Thomas himself, isn’t exactly trying to reinvent the wheel here (although the title track does a damned fine job), but he is one of the best guitarists in the state, he has a great big bear of a voice that sounds fantastic double-tracked, and best of all, he has a sense of FEEL that some bluesmen twice his age don’t know yet. Make sure you listen to this on your next trip down Cancer Alley to Baton Rouge. But for God’s sake, get a tune-up first. This sort of background music is almost too real.