D. Scott Riggs – These Hard Times Will Come To Pass
Pure Panhandle Music
11 songs – 43 minutes
After a relatively barren period, there appears to have been a recent resurgence in interest in traditional acoustic blues, driven in large part by solo singer-guitarists, often armed with National or other resonator-type guitar. One such example is Gulf Coast-based songwriter/musician, D. Scott Riggs, who plays what he terms “panhandle blues”, meshing pre-war Delta blues, Piedmont blues and a chunk of Texas gospel-blues, with a dash of hokum.
Recorded at Slow Q Studio in Pensacola, Florida, These Hard Times Will Come To Pass features just Riggs, armed with resonator and acoustic guitars and a gravelly voice that could strip paint at 30 paces. It is also an aural delight from start to finish. Unfortunately, the CD and accompanying press release do not record who engineered and mastered the project, but they captured a stunning sound that has one foot in the modern day and one foot in a period that passed about 100 years ago. The CD does not record who composed the songs, although if this reviewer had to guess, he’d say they sound self-written, albeit heavily influenced by the gospel blues of the likes of Blind Willie Johnson and the Reverend Edward W. Clayborn.
Lyrically, the songs mine the same religious, gospel blues vein in which Johnson and Clayborn specialized, albeit with significantly more instrumental virtuosity than Clayborn. Of course, nobody can touch Johnson when it comes to instrumental virtuosity (let’s face it, when one of your songs is chosen by Carl Sagan and his team to encapsulate essential sounds and images from planet Earth to send into outer space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, then you have recorded something genuinely other-worldly).
This is not to do Riggs down. He is a superb guitarist, and his touch with a slide on tracks such as the minor key “Here Comes The Conductor” is absolutely superlative, hinting at what Skip James might have accomplished if he had played slide guitar. He’s also a mighty fine finger-picker, as evidenced by the likes of “Stranger, Come On In.”
Riggs’ road-worn voice suits the material perfectly, sounding alternatively weary, worn-down, hopeful, full of despair, optimistic and full of faith. His vocal performance on the intricately finger-picked “Each Night I Say A Prayer” is especially impressive.
These Hard Times Will Come To Pass has something of a timeless feel to it, which is perhaps not surprising given that it features songs so rooted in the 1920s but benefits from 2020s recording techniques. It is also a very, very impressive, enjoyable release.
Some CDs make one want to dig out every other release an artist has made. These Hard Times Will Come To Pass is one such album.
