Guy Davis’ music lies right at the intersection of blues and folk and up until now with Be Ready When I Call You his albums have been largely packed with great interpretations of traditional material. This kind of work culminated in Davis’s previous album with harmonica ace Fabrizio Poggi, Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train, being nominated for a 2017 Grammy. With over a dozen albums behind him, this new one marks the first time Davis has written practically all the songs. Only Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” stands as the lone cover. Issues of social justice, racial history, immigration, unemployment, Flint water, and coincidentally what seems so timely, Mideastern strife, tend to dominate the subject matter which otherwise, turns to the usual subjects of love and blues philosophy.
Davis plays guitar, banjo, and harmonica and he is a terrific, immensely captivating solo live performer. Often though he plays festival dates with a quartet which he features here, mostly Woodstock area folks, Professor Louie (keyboards), Gary Burke (drums), John Platania (guitar), and Mark Murphy (standup bass and cello). Other contributors include Christopher James (acoustic guitar, 6 string banjo, mandolin), Jeff Haynes (percussion), David Bernz, Timothy Hill, and Casey Erdman (all of background vocals). Aaron Hurwitz who did much work with the second generation of The Band, mixed and engineered.
Davis clearly brings his folksinger political protest voice to this effort. In recent years we have heard more about the now-infamous Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, commemorated as Juneteenth, memorably through ‘Keb ‘Mo, shamefully via a politically incorrect location for a Trump political rally, and now in Davis’ tune “God’s Gonna Make Things Over (Greenwood)” The chorus lines are indelible “It ain’t right, It ain’t right/What the white folks did in Tulsa that night” and later “Tell me what did you learn/When you watched my body burn/When you hang me from a tree. Raise me high so my people can see.” “Flint River Blues” takes that crisis head on with his commentary about how the governor’s staff had bottled water to drink while the children of Flint “drank from the kitchen sink.” “200 Days” speaks to the loss of manufacturing jobs with its opening line – “200 days since the mill closed down.” That one and “I Got a Job in the City” both speak to racial divide and bias as typified by the line in the latter where the Wall Street lady shunned him for his lack of suit and tie.
The warfare in Israel and Palestine was not at a boil when David wrote “Palestine, Oh Palestine” but current events add more salience to the chorus “Palestine, oh Palestine. Where have you gone? Where have you gone.” Davis uses his background vocalists for emphasis here and in another standout “I’ve Looked Around” which both embraces America as a melting pot for immigrants and decries the nature of hostility toward people of many races recently, inspired most directly by the border crisis as he wonders the whereabouts and state of his children. He takes on the former President directly in “Welcome to My World” with a diatribe as scathing as any – “Stormy Daniels got you laid/Michael Cohen got you paid/Saudis got a bone saw blade/But you’ve got no soul left to trade/For your misbehavior” and later “They’re laws that help to keep us free. The Constitution’s a guarantee/ That you can’t come and fuck with me.”
Yes, there are some more conventional topics too as the title track which revisits the Robert Johnson legend. Yet, even that one is essentially related to protest injustice as Davis indicates that all should be ready when called. He writes about twice, with “I Thought I Heard the Devil Call My Name” later in the sequence. Several others are more tender, speaking to leaving a bad situation, some redeemed and some unredeemed, the former most vividly exemplified in “Every Now and Then” troubled childhood alluded to also in the Taj Mahal-like “Badonkadonk Train,” and the fond remembrance of a sorely missed lover in “Got Your Letter in My Pocket.”
This is Guy Davis with his own voice delivering bitter and poignant commentary on troubling issues of these times mixed in with some of the blues you’d expect from him. His soothing voice and smoothly flowing music clothes the anger and angst that is impossible to ignore. He has delivered a timely project, his most important one.
One Response
Thanks Jim for the thoughtful review!