With Into Your Blues, the versatile Johnny Sansone returns to the music that inspired him to be a musician. The singer/harmonica player and his big band of musicians romp and roll through a swampy, soulful set of blues songs. Sansone sings his original compositions with impressive range and decades of stage-tested authority.

The album title song, “Into Your Blues,” sets the pace with mighty horn parts and a gale-force harmonica solo in the Little Walter Jacobs tradition. Moving to a Jimmy Reed-style groove, “Pay for This Song” gets topical, addressing the shamefully small compensation that music-streaming services and their customers give recording artists. Sansone is one of the many who receive only pennies for their studio work. “I want you to know right from wrong,” he sings with some humor. “I ain’t in no steady rotation, but that still don’t change your obligation.”

Among the more soul-edged songs and productions on Into Your Blues, “Desperation” could easily be in the discographies of classic soul stars Percy Sledge and David Ruffin. Expanding from blues and soul, Sansone injects funk into “Something Good Going On,” a song enhanced by one of his down-in-the-well harmonica solos and a burly baritone sax solo from Brad Walker.

“New Crossroads” revives an old blues theme. Shouting his blues and blowing psychedelicized harmonica, Sansone and the song’s hypnotic rhythm summon that mythical Southern place, the blues crossroads of legend and imagination.

Fitting for Sansone and any other New Orleans musician, there’s much groove in Into Your Blues. Examples of that include the strutting “People Like You and Me” and on-the-move “The Getaway.” A strong follow-up to his popular 2018 album, Hopeland, Sansone’s new album also makes on-the-money use of its special guests, Little Freddie King and Jason Ricci.