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Booker's Guitar ReviewThe half-spoken, half-sung song Eric Bibb wrote for Bukka White is even more striking, and touching, than the chance encounter with the fan toting White's legendary National steelbody resonator guitar that prodded Bibb to write the piece (and play it on the actual guitar) in the first place. And what follows from there is one of the most unique modern exercises in the acoustic blues tradition you'll hear this or any year.
Bibb lays away from the slamming chords and slashing slides that have become as much a cliche of acoustic blues as have boring sheets of overdrive, distortion, feedback, and external effects become of electric blues these days. Instead, he rolls gentle fingerpicking, softly deep low-register notes, almost fondled chords, and understated upper register notes---in tandem with Grant Dermody's refreshing, almost vocal harmonica passages---below his expressive baritone, on a round of mostly original material that might become new blues standards if the overdrive or slam-and-slash crowds allow themselves make room for them.
"Flood Water" alone would be worth the price if tributes to the dead masters aren't your idea of blues revelation (it may be the most haunting song Bibb has written to date), but so would his answer song to Robert Johnson's often-bypassed "Walking Blues," "Walkin' Blues Again." Bibb comes up with his own answer and makes it as mesmerising as was Taj Mahal's gripping, understated electric re-imagination of the Johnson classic. So is his re-imagnining of Blind Willie Johnson's "Nobody's Fault But Mine," laying off his guitar but singing with a conviction that doesn't have to be barked or growled to hit you in the heart and binding it with Dermody's rhythmically horn-like harmonica over almost muted gospel handclaps. (It beats the living hell out of Led Zeppelin's piledriving rewrite, for one.) So is his re-imagining of the acoustic standard "Wayfaring Stranger," on which you can feel the quietly dusty wind of the backroad, not quite obscuring hoof steps from an exhausted horse, from Dermody's harmonica. It almost feels like the kind of low-keyed song you'd expect at the end of a film about its subject, between the fadeaway of a dusty sunset and the yellowed hue of the closing credit.
"Flood Water" and "Booker's Guitar" have serious competition, for the title of Bibb's best original of the set, from "Sunrise Blues," a pleasantly loping string-walk beneath a lyric he fashioned based on a self-professed Delta flashback, "a little sepia film in my head," he says in the booklet notes, and he backs it up with a series of poetic lyric clips (if Bibb isn't the most poetic blues lyricist working now, he's in a dead heat with whomever might be number one), a vocal that whispers as much as it speaks, and softly punchy little low-string lines. And "Tell Riley," his affectionate tribute to Bukka White's slightly more renowned cousin (B.B. King), manages to say thank you without cliche or sentimentalism. Anyone writing songs in tribute to their inspirations could take a powerful lesson from this execution. (He does likewise with a brief but affecting instrumental, "Train From Aberdeen," which he says was provoked during the time he'd become gripped by falling upon White's guitar, thinking about White constantly, and remembering what trains meant to White's story.)
This is the best acoustic bluesman working that too-often-bypassed side of the blues road today. Once upon a time, English blues tributary John Mayall boasted of a lineup playing "blues without bashing." Eric Bibb has achieved it. And while you may not think of acoustic blues as blues with bashing, one playing of Bibb's new masterwork and you'll figure out how even the acoustic bluesmen can bash and slash and sometimes shove the soul of their work a little to the side in the doing. Somewhere, walking the backstreets and byways of heaven, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, no few of Bibb's own family (he's a nephew of Modern Jazz Quartet mastermind John Lewis, who never forgot the blues himself), and Robert Johnson are listening in awe. As should you.
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