Issue 19-3 January 16, 2025

Cover photo © 2025 Bob Kieser


 In This Issue 

This week we feature a vintage interview of Blues legend, Magic Slim. This interview by Terry Mullins originally ran in the August 5th, 2011 issue. We have four Blues reviews for you this week including a re-release of a 45 song, live performance by John Hammond recorded in 1973 plus new music from Mississippi MacDonald, Carly Harvey and The Rigmarollers. Our video of the week is Magic Slim live at the old Buddy Guy’s Legends from 1987. Scroll down and check it out!



 Video Of The Week – Magic Slim 

Our video of the week is a 27 minute recording of Magic Slim & the Teardrops playing live at the old Buddy Guy’s Legends club. His band at the time included John Primer on guitar and a young Matthew Skollar is featured on harmonica on one song. Click on the image to view the video.



 Featured Blues Review – 1 of 4 

imageMississippi MacDonald – I Got What You Need

APM Records

www.mississippimacdonald.com

9 songs time – 35:40

London, England’s Mississippi MacDonald (Oliver MacDonald) delivers a dose of blues and soul blues with gritty vocals and guitar. He is backed by the usual suspects of keyboards, bass, drums, guitar and backing vocals. Six songs are band written. The emphasis is on the music with the lyrics being kind of run-of-the-mill.

Although his guitar playing is fine throughout, I’m particularly drawn to the instrumental tribute to Freddie King, “3:35 AM” channels the essence Freddie’s sound. The other instrumental is the Stax Records flavored “Soul City One” with it’s sturdy bass line, but overall the guitar riff is way too repetitive.

His hardy voice is on the mark over the recording. It is showcased on the gritty “Hard Luck And Trouble” alongside his earnest guitar slinging. The vocal is movingly dramatic on the slow and poignant “Sinking”. “The water has come over the sides, this boat is sinking”. The title track “I Got What You Need” chugs along propelled by the urgent sounding guitar.

Mississippi turns in the required soulful vocal on the gospel classic “If I Could Only Hear My Mother Pray Again”, backed by Lucy Randall’s doubled backing vocals. “Your Dreams” closes the proceedings on a slow note with only piano and low-key electric guitar accompanying his moving vocal.

MacDonald has delivered a well produced and thoughtfully performed CD. Having a crack band doesn’t hurt. Producer Phil Dearing also added piano and organ throughout, as well as additional guitar. The rhythm section of drummer Jim Kimberley and Eliott Boughen on bass shore everything up nicely. The tradition of British Blues is continued here to good effect. This effort is surely worth your listening attention.

Reviewer Greg “Bluesdog” Szalony hails from the New Jersey Delta.



 Featured Blues Review – 2 of 4 

imageCarly Harvey – Kamama

Do Good Records

www.carlyharvey.com

11 songs – 36 minutes

Honeyed alto Carly Harvey may be the reining queen of the Washington, D.C., blues scene but she offers up far more than the blues on this interesting, hard-to-define and deeply personal debut set.  Sharing African-American and Indigenous roots, she fuses both cultures and transports them back to their roots with a style she brands as “native scat” — a contemporary mix of blues, funk, jazz and much, much more.

A dynamic performer with a confident, sassy swagger and multi-octave range, Carly is descended from members of the Eastern Band Tsalagi and Tuscarora nations as well as a seven-time nominee in the D.C. Blues Society’s Wammie Awards, winning the organization’s band-of-the-year trophy once. She and her backing group have also come out on top in three of its annual battle-of-the-bands competition.

An all-original effort chockful of pentatonic melodies common to the lullabies, flute music and dances of her Indigenous and Delta-based forebears, Harvey co-produced this CD with Mark Kenneth Williams. She’s backed by Jonathan Sloane on guitar, Wes Lanich and Daniel Clarke on keys, Mike Tony Echols, Stan Hurley and Patrick Thornton on bass and Coleman Williams, Dave Blessman, Leland Nakamura and Mark Williams on drums throughout with Danny Davis, Mario D’Ambrosio and Kevin Cerovich composing the horn section.

It’s a star-studded effort, too. Joe Louis Walker guests on guitar, Doug Woolverton on trumpet and  Dave Keller provides guitar and vocals. Annika Chambers-DesLauriers shares the mic on one tune, and Walking Eagle — best known for his appearance on The Voice — sits in on guitar, percussion, flute on backing vocals on four cuts. And Dana Nearing lends her voice to three others.

You know you’re in for something different from the opening bars of “Native Scat.” It’s a haunting number fueled by Walking Eagle’s slide-guitar work. It works in magical call-and-response fashion with Harvey’s chanting. Joe Louis comes onboard next for the driving, uptempo blues, “Mean Old Woman.” It finds Carly echoing the words of a lover, who tells her: “All I want to do is argue all the time” and that he can’t take it anymore. But, she notes, what he didn’t say was that “he was sneakin’ out the backdoor.” The stop-time section mid-tune and Joe’s discordant solo rock.

The pace slows at the open of the torch song, “Misery,” which finds Harvey still fretting over her man and feeling that “sometimes livin’ with you just ain’t livin’ at all.” Her pain is palpable – as is her commitment to leave — driven home by Sloane’s six-string, but softened somewhat by the sweet fills by the keys and horn section. The feel continues continues with “She Ain’t Me,” which opens as a medium-paced shuffle and builds in intensity as Carly deals with the loneliness she feels whenever her man’s other woman comes around.

A Latin-flavored horn flourish from Woolverton instantly changes the mood for the sweet “Please Do That to Me,” which would appeal to anyone who loves jazzy tunes that echo ’50s café society jams. While confessing she’s two different women – modest outside and something else entirely when the doors are closed, Harvey tells a lover that she knows he’s got “tricks up his sleeve, that he’s kinky and implores him: “Don’t hold out on me.”

It eases into “Let Me Go,” a bittersweet number in which Harvey finds herself moving on and shedding a “box of memories” from a failed romance. Clarke’s keys dominate the open of the ballad, “Take Your Love,” as Carly realizes she’s been played for a fool and there’s no happy ending this time. Another chant filled pleaser, “Kamama,” follows before Annika and Keller join forces for the powerful “Human Too,” which includes more chants and Native American drumbeats and wonders why some folks are so afraid of people who look different than they do.

“Worth Waiting For” finds Harvey unwilling to fuss or fight with her man because he walked out the door. But she acknowledges that the relationship was great when it was right and offers him one more chance to make it right. Walking Eagle’s flute powers a reprise of “Native Scat” to close.

Sure, there’s plenty of emotional upheaval here. But I’m sure you’ll love it. Give Carly a chance. She’s definitely a star on the rise.

Blues Blast Magazine Senior writer Marty Gunther has lived a blessed life. Now based out of Mason, Ohio, his first experience with live music came at the feet of the first generation of blues legends at the Newport Folk Festivals in the 1960s. A former member of the Chicago blues community, he’s a professional journalist and blues harmonica player who co-founded the Nucklebusters, one of the hardest working bands in South Florida.



 Featured Blues Review – 3 of 4 

imageThe Rigmarollers – 21st Century Speakeasy

Self-Release – 2024

www.therigmarollers.com

10 tracks; 33 minutes

The Rigmarollers are based in and play around the UK from their London base. The trio is Ed Hopwood on vocals, harp and percussion, Julian Marshall on guitar and mandolin and Ewan Penkey on sousaphone; Precious Pierre and Lucy Tasker add banjo and clarinet respectively to some of the tracks. The trio makes quite a big sound, considering the lack of drums, the sousaphone filling the bottom end, Ed providing enough percussion effects behind his harp and Julian’s guitar. This is their second album and consists of entirely original material, lyrics mainly written by Ed, music by the trio.

As the album title suggests, theband looks back to musical styles from long ago with elements of jazz and vaudeville sitting alongside the rhythms of Louisiana. Opener “Mr Crawfish” extols the Louisiana favourite, the choppy rhythm and harp fills making this one of the tunes here that comes closest to the blues. Next we go down to the seaside to hear about the “Yarmouth Belle”, a steamboat on which you can “do the Charleston and the Lindy Hop”, played to a ragtime rhythm over which Julian plucks a rather nice solo. Ed’s very English sounding vocal takes the voice of the landlord, the self-dubbed “Duke Of Rent”, who threatens to put his tenants out on the street. The first appearance of the clarinet gives “Sycamore Street” quite a jazzy feel, but the lyrics deal with drugs, even scandalously claiming that “Queen Victoria, she loved a pipe at noon”!

Ed’s harp introduces the jaunty “What’s The Use In Walking”, a song that references the early days of the bicycle before a tune that is almost an instrumental, apart from a vocal rendition of the title, “Duck Blood Breakdown”; Ed’s harp on this one copies the accordion, giving the tune a distinctly New Orleans flavour. The NO feel continues with banjo added to the instrumentation on “Macadam Bill” which makes reference to the Prohibition era, Ed using a distorted vocal effect for the first part of the song. Thematically we remain in the realm of alcohol with “Sweet Liquor” as Ed recounts lapsing back into the bar as the clarinet and banjo again evoke the music of the 1920’s. The band closes with two short but cheerfully upbeat tunes: “Elenor” appears to be deeply religious but cannot stop Ed’s character from leaving town, the rattling percussion and bubbling sousaphone pushing things along well; everyone is involved in “Too Tight” to provide a really catchy finale as the banjo and the clarinet’s higher pitched interventions are carried along by The Rigmarollers’ irresistible rhythms.

To be honest there is not much blues here but it is a lot of fun if you enjoy songs that sound like they belong back a century or so.

Blues Blast Magazine Senior writer John Mitchell is a blues enthusiast based in the UK who enjoys a wide variety of blues and roots music, especially anything in the ‘soul/blues’ category. Favorites include contemporary artists such as Curtis Salgado, Tad Robinson, Albert Castiglia and Doug Deming and classic artists including Bobby Bland, Howling Wolf and the three ‘Kings’. He gets over to the States as often as he can to see live blues.



 Featured Blues Review – 4 of 4 

imageJohn Hammond – Bear’s Sonic Journals: You’re Doin’ Fine

Owsley Stanley Foundation

www.owsleystanleyfoundation.org

45 songs – 3 hours 15 minutes

The son of the top producer and talent scout at Columbia Records, guitar John Hammond learned his craft while hanging out with a galaxy of stars from the first generation of country blues on his dad’s label and transporting them to gigs in New York City. He already was a major star himself with more than ten LPs when this three-disc album was recorded. But you’ve never heard him sounding better than what you’ll hear here.

What makes this collection different than anything else that’s been captured in Hammond’s 60-year career is the actual recording process, which is a story unto itself.

Laid down across two nights in 1973 at The Boarding House in San Francisco, The man running the board was Owsley Stanley, aka Bear, the Dead’s longtime soundman. And while you might recognize his name because of the version of LSD that psychedelicized the ’60s, Owsley was a genius in many ways. He was a genius in whatever he did, including electronics and his passion to capture a live performance in a way that no one else did.

Obsessive about high-fidelity sound, it was his desire to capture the Dead and all of his subjects in a manner that emulated the same feel produced in rehearsal. When it came to live shows, his goal was to reproduce the music emanating from the stage along with all of the ambient sounds of the audience in addition to the star himself – an approach that differed from mainstream labels, which re-engineered the product to eliminate all but the tunes themselves.

He achieved the feat after years of tinkering thanks to the careful and precise placement of microphones around the room, and he called the end result his “Sonic Journals.” And many of his best recordings were captured at The Boarding House, then the top nightclub in Bay Area, a place that hosted musical talent that ranged from Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead to Dolly Parton and the Talking Heads and the occasional bluesman and launched the careers of Robin Williams, Steve Martin and other top comics, too.

Young John lives again through this performance. You can hear a pin drop as he sits on a stool mid-stage accompanied by only his harmonica and acoustic guitar. Every string he hits, rings like a bell, beginning with a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” concluding with Chuck Willis’ “Too Late, She’s Gone” and sandwiching 43 other tunes from the first half-century of blues in between. And all the applause and interplay between the singer and the crowd are so fresh and clear, you’re virtually seated in the audience, too.

All of your favorites are here, including Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” Dixon’s “Help Me” and “Shake for Me,” Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Honeymoon Blues” and “Traveling Riverside Blues,”  Billy Boy Arnold’s “I Wish You Would,” Slim Harpo’s “King Bee,” Elmore James’ “Look on Yonder’s Wall,” Little Walter’s “You’re So Fine,” Blind Boy Fuller’s “Rag Mama” and “Truckin’ Little Baby,” Tampa Red’s “It Hurts Me Too” and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” and “Ground Hog Blues.”

And not to be overlooked are L’il Son Jackson’s “Gambling Blues,” Black Ace’s “Hitchhiking Woman,” Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Death Bells,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Riding in the Midnight,” Mose Allison’s “Ask Me Nice,” Son House’s “Preachin’ Blues,” Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” and more – all of which are delivered passionately by John, who breathes new life into all of them with few repetitions in the set.

As great as the music is in and of itself, making this collection an over-the-top success is the packaging. The CDs are housed within a 68-page booklet — essential reading that details Owsley’s work, all aspects of the nights in question and also takes a deep, deep dive into Hammond’s early career along with a remembrance from Tom Waits, who served as John’s opening act for these sessions.

Don’t miss this one. It’s special!

Blues Blast Magazine Senior writer Marty Gunther has lived a blessed life. Now based out of Mason, Ohio, his first experience with live music came at the feet of the first generation of blues legends at the Newport Folk Festivals in the 1960s. A former member of the Chicago blues community, he’s a professional journalist and blues harmonica player who co-founded the Nucklebusters, one of the hardest working bands in South Florida.



 VINTAGE Interview – Magic Slim 

It has been an integral part of helping to shape and define what we now call the modern blues sound.

And it’s probably been around even longer than the blues have.

It was the thing that elder statesmen, from Son House to Muddy Waters, along with the younger generation of stars like Terry “Harmonica” Bean and beyond, first learned to play on.

It’s not a Fender Stratocaster, a National Steel Resonator or a Gibson Les Paul.

It’s something that is far less sexy, far less sleek than a Strat, a Resonator or a Les Paul.

It’s an ordinary, average corn broom.

And like Son House and Muddy Waters – along with about every family that lived around him when he was growing up in the early 1940s in Mississippi – young Morris Holt’s family had one of those ordinary, average corn brooms.

And it was that particular corn broom helped transform Morris Holt into Magic Slim.

“Well, I made my first guitar upside the wall with a strand of wire off a broom,” Slim recently related.

While the rest of his family was in town one Saturday afternoon, Slim liberated the bailing wire from his momma’s broom and nailed it to the wall of their home near Granada, Mississippi. “You’d really be surprised at what sound two bottles and a piece of wire can make,” he said.

And while Slim was suitably impressed with his homemade instrument, the first lady of the house was not.

“When momma and them came back, I was playing it. And then she whipped me for tearin’ up her broom,” Slim said. “But she said one time that if she’d known what I’d be into later, she wouldn’t have whipped me.”

What Magic Slim is into, is keeping the sounds and traditions of textbook Chicago blues alive – the kind that was favored at spots like Florence’s Lounge and on Maxwell Street – back in the day.

And although young Morris Holt would grow up and find his fame in Chicago, playing in and around places like those, his formative years in rural Mississippi have not been pushed to the side by any means.

That’s why Pinky Holt Taylor would certainly be proud to know that her son was recently the recipient of one of the Mississippi Blues Commission’s newest markers along the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Magic Slim’s marker stands on Union Street in Granada, not too far from Queen’s Eat Shop, a restaurant that was operated by his mother.

“I’m 73 years old and I love what I do,” Slim said when asked about the marker. “I’m just thankful that I can do what I do.”

The names of Nick Holt and Douglas “Lee Baby” Holt also adorn Slim’s trail marker, especially fitting since they both played alongside their brother as members of The Teardrops. Nick was a longtime bassist for the group, while Douglas held down the drum throne.

It’s also very fitting that another one of the Mississippi Blues Commission’s Blues Trail markers can also be found in Granada, not too awful far from Magic Slim’s.

That marker bears the name of Slim’s one-time schoolmate – and later on – one-time bandmate – Samuel Gene Maghett – aka the late, great Magic Sam.

In fact, it was Magic Sam that dubbed Morris Holt as Magic Slim.

Slim left Mississippi for the big city of Chicago in 1955, five years after Magic Sam’s migration to the Windy City.

And it wasn’t long before Slim had made his way into his old friend from back home’s band, playing bass.

“Man, I was just slim and tall and he got to calling me Magic Slim,” said Slim. “And right before he died, he told me to keep that name … that it would make me famous some day. So I did and here I am.”

But it wasn’t quite that easy.

When he really began concentrating on the guitar, Slim realized that he had a ways to go until he caught up with the other six-string slingers on the scene in Chicago.

“Well, a lot of them guys said I couldn’t play, so I went back to Mississippi,” he said. “And then when I got back there (to Chicago in 1965), I was ready for ‘em.”

It wasn’t too long before brother Nick, who would eventually lead a band of his own, joined Slim in the big city, jump-starting a 40-year career of playing in The Teardrops.

While the lineup has changed a few times over the past decades, one thing has remained steadfast – the way that Magic Slim and The Teardrops, who are six-time winners of the Blues Music Award’s (BMAs) Blues Band of Year, deal out mega helpings of authentic Chicago blues.

With several hundred songs to pull out of their trick bag, no two shows by Magic Slim and The Teardrops are ever the same.

And that’s just fine with the countless fans that have seen the big man in action.

There’s certainly no shortage of bands traveling across the globe playing the blues in 2011.

But how many of them can say that they have recorded for the same record label for 20 straight years?

Not many.

But Magic Slim has managed to show remarkable staying power in this category, and he recently celebrated his 20th year of recording for the Blind Pig record label.

And with Raising the Bar, his eighth release on Blind Pig, Magic Slim and The Teardrops continue to do just that, setting a lofty standard for all practitioners of the blues to follow.

However, Slim’s journey to the top of the mountain in the Chicago blues world might have taken a bit of a different path had it not been for an accident at a cotton gin when he was a mere lad of 13.

His right hand got caught on a wire in the gin and quick as lightning, Slim knew he was in trouble. “It liked to have chopped my whole hand off. It didn’t, but it sure messed it up,” he said. That accident in the cotton gin may have ended up halting Slim’s budding love affair with the piano, but it sent him full-bore into the arms of the guitar.

“I was trying to play the piano when I got hurt. I was starting to mess around on guitar then, too. But after I got hurt, I couldn’t play the piano cause I didn’t have a pinky finger,” he said. “So I really started messin’ with the guitar.”

And several decades later, Magic Slim continues to “mess with the guitar.”

His earth-shaking vibrato and chunky riffs harkens back to another time without ever once sounding old-fashioned.

“Well, I feel like I need to do it (play Chicago blues),” he said. “It seems like there’s nobody else doing it, so I feel like I should be doing it. I like to do it and I want to do it.”

Like a lot of other musicians who grew up in the Magnolia State just after World War II, listening to the radio was an important part of the Holt household.

That is, on Saturday and Sundays when the kids were allowed to take a brief break from work and entrain themselves by tuning in to WLAC out of Nashville.

“We listened to the radio. That was practically all we had down there (for entertainment) at that time,” said Slim. “And when I first started, I used to play county-and-western and bluegrass. But I heard John Lee Hooker when he put out his first record, “Boogie Chillen,” and that inspired me to start playing the blues. And I went from there.”

Slim’s days of playing a homemade Diddly-Bow nailed to the side of the house are long in his rear-view mirror.

These days, he prefers something with a little more “punch,” a little more “pizzazz,” to it.

“I like a Super Reverb (amp) and a Jazzmaster or a Les Paul,” he said. “The way I have my amp turned, I get that dull sound and my guitar has switches on it and I work them switches. But all I do is just play, man. I just try to do my best. I feel good doing it, because I do it with feeling.”

Just because Magic Slim is like a walking, talking encyclopedia of Chicago blues, that doesn’t mean that he’s tuned out anything that was created after 1950.

Quite the contrary.

Slim had enough of an open mind to leave his old stomping grounds and set up camp in New York, letting Popa Chubby produce and play on his 2002 release, Blue Magic, giving the CD a “Chubbified” feel to it.

Then there’s the whole new generation of young bucks fighting to make a name for themselves these days and Slim is paying particularly close attention to one of those “young ‘uns.”

“There’s some good young players out there these days,” he said. “I got a son named Lil’ Slim and he’s really comin’ on. He’s got his own band and he ain’t playing nothing but the blues.”…

Interviewer Terry Mullins is a journalist and former record store owner whose personal taste in music is the sonic equivalent of Attention Deficit Disorder. Works by the Bee Gees, Captain Beefheart, Black Sabbath, Earth, Wind & Fire and Willie Nelson share equal space with Muddy Waters, The Staple Singers and R.L. Burnside in his compact disc collection. He’s also been known to spend time hanging out on the street corners of Clarksdale, Mississippi, eating copious amounts of barbecued delicacies while listening to the wonderful sounds of the blues


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