2022 has been another strong year for today’s top female blues artist, Shemekia Copeland. She won the Blues Artist of the Year in Downbeat’s Annual Critics Poll for the second straight year and earned the same award as the top female artist from Living Blues. She was the only blues artist to perform with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Brian Blade, Gregory Porter, and many others on the floor of the UN for International Jazz Day. Copeland is consistent and loyal.
Done Come Too Far marks her third consecutive album produced by singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Will Kimbrough and her fourth straight recorded in Nashville. Three of them have earned Grammy nominations (she has four in total) and this recent effort may well be the one that earns her that elusive win. The Kimbrough-Copeland pairing now delivers the third topically themed album, which she claims caps the trilogy. Copeland records in Nashville with the best roots musicians on the planet but separately, two members of her road band have been with her for two decades. That’s being consistent and loyal.
A riveting live performer who leaves it all on the stage, in the storied history of blues music, there have been precious few who can belt out a tune as powerfully as she does. You can guess the names. Yet, there are few contemporary artists who have the courage to confront issues like Copeland does. Given that this one caps the trilogy, she puts a little extra into it.
She uses history to defiantly state that despite making some progress on racial issues that we are far from done. “Too Far to Be Gone” features Sonny Landreth’s slide guitar and assisting her on the title track is Mississippi Hill Country icon Cedric Burnside. She pleas to put an end to gun violence in “Pink Turns to Red” with three guitarists in tow – Kimbrough, Kevin Gordon, and Kenny Brown. And perhaps in the most poignant of all, “The Talk,” she, as a Black mother, provides sobering education and advice for her son who survives an encounter with the police. Guest Rev. Charles Hodges of the acclaimed Hi Rhythm Section (Al Green, Ann Peebles) adds his B3 organ. “Gullah Geechee” speaks to the descendants of slaves in South Carolina’s Lowcountry as the chorus of “still trying to be free” rings through with traditional Gullah hand-clapping rhythms and Cedric Watson’s African gourd banjo. The acoustic “Dolls Are Sleeping” speaks to those secrets kept about child abuse, another rarely heard blues topic while the horn-infused “Dumb it Down” points to unspeakable prejudice.
The material is not all socio-political though as per her style, she presents a balanced program. “Why, Why, Why” covers Susan Werner’s song about infidelity with three background singers serving as a choir. Pure joy and fun take hold in a rather witty look at Southern customs in the zydeco-styled “Fried Catfish and Bibles” while she brings a celebratory, danceable vibe to Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Barefoot in Heaven.” Her rowdy “Fell in Love with a Honky” may sound ostensibly witty but in fact is somewhat autobiographical as she is in an interracial marriage except that her husband is not a country fan at all, more a metal head. So, the two of them likely get a kick out of it. Kimbrough’s instrumental choices are spot on, case in point is Fats Kaplan’s pedal steel in this one. And, back to that consistent attribute – Shemekia has never failed to record an album without at least one of her father’s songs and she wraps up this one with the deeply emotional love song, “Nobody But You.”
Shemekia Copeland is not only the most important blues artist of these times. Shemekia is the rare combination of authentic chops and superior songs. She has little interest in the typical blues subjects. Instead, she confronts meaningful issues directly and courageously, making her one of our most important musical voices in any genre.
