Catfish Keith – Shake Me Up
Fish Tail Records FTRCD0022
14 songs – 51 minutes
A perennial Blues Blast Music Awards nominee for acoustic artist of the year and a frequent winner, too, Catfish Keith is a breath of fresh air in a world dominated by electric guitars. Playing solo and touring the world for almost 50 years, he’s a beloved practitioner of the songster tradition, putting his own spin on a mix of classic country blues, ragtime and gospel and dovetailing an occasional original to spice things up a bit.
It’s a winning formula that’s produced 22 previous albums along the way, during which he’s also been considered for Grammys and Blues Music Awards 27 times and frequently topped the playlists of radio stations around the globe.
A native of East Chicago, Ind., Keith’s been working out of Iowa for decades, and he’s at the top of his game here, delivering some of the sweetest picking you’ll hear this or any year on six-strings built by several of the top acoustic luthiers in the world: National Reso-Phonic, Santa Cruz Guitar, Diamond Bottlenecks, Fraulini Guitars and Ralph S. Bown.
This set was recorded and mastered by Luke Tweety at Flat Black Studios in Iowa City and co-produced by Catfish and his wife/manager, Penny Cahill, who engineered. It’s a treasure trove of tunes – some familiar standards and others unduly obscured by Father Time.
Keith eases into action with the original, “My Only Little Darlin’ One,” drawing his inspiration from first-generation bluesmen Barbecue Bob and Laughing Charlie Lincoln. It’s a song of longing for a love lost years ago, and you can feel the loss in the tension Catfish builds between his vocals and guitar runs.
The mood brightens somewhat as he launches into a take on Lottie Kimbrough’s 1928 Paramount release, “Rolling Log Blues,” despite describing someone struggling to find room and board, then takes listeners to church with an updated version of Dennis Crompton and Robert Summers’ uplifting gospel classic, “Go, I Will Send Thee.”
Rev. Gary Davis’ “Candyman/Salty Dog” finds Keith yearning for a trip to New Orleans before the original “Fuss & Fight” finds Catfish playing in open-C tuning, something he hadn’t used since his youth, and regretting past mistakes. “Sleep Baby Sleep,” the first tune recorded by country kingpin Jimmie Rodgers in 1928, revives a pleasant, yodeled lullaby before Little Hat Jones’ “Long Gone From Kentucky” follows suit. It’s a dusty treasure from Okeh in 1930 that recounts the escape of a fugitive from the long arm of the law.
Washboard Sam’s ragtime classic, “Who Pumped the Wind in My Doughnut,” delivers a little long-forgotten sexual inuendo then yields to Washington Phillips’ recollection of leaving home with the inspirational “Mother’s Last Words to Her Son” and advice to stick with Jesus through thick and thin. Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” is tune from the American songbook, but Catfish Keith’s aggressive attack on the strings truly makes it his own.
Three more classics — Mississippi John Hurt’s “My Creole Belle,” Lonnie Johnson’s “Careless Love” and Blind Blake’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” – follow before Catfish lovingly concludes the set with a reading “There Will Be a Happy Meeting,” an instrumental composed by Bahamian Joseph Spence, whose stylings were a major influence to many current-era acoustic artists, including Keith, Taj Mahal and even the Grateful Dead, too.
Sure, there’s a lot of old-time music here, but there’s a whole lot of joyful picking and fun as well. Shake Me Up is a pure delight.
