Posts by Doug Collette

The dominant blue color scheme of the cover of Davy Knowles’ The Invisible Man is similar to that of his prior album. The two records are companion pieces of a sort, but whereas 2021’s What Happens Next consolidated the Isle of Man native’s essential songwriting and performing talents, the long-player fell woefully short in exhibiting the former Back Door […]

With fifty-five years’ hindsight, the relatively minimal impact of The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut record (released 11/4/69) was out of proportion to the band’s potential, eventual commercial success, and artistic influence. Famed producer Tom Dowd—Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Eric Clapton, among others—was to oversee the sessions, but the band’s subsequent long-time collaborator ran […]

Long before Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee were slotted into the opening of Dave Chapelle’s short-lived series on Comedy Central, their winning charm had earned them accolades for their authenticity, not the least of which were accorded them by comparably well-regarded musicians like pianist Otis Spann. In this video from French TV in 1964, the trio […]

Applying thirty-year hindsight to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers (released 11/1/94) inevitably considers the archival projects devoted to the title in more recent years. Each, in its own way—and as an all-encompassing archival effort—illuminates how and why this record became such an object of devotion for the late lamented artist. Wildflowers may or may not be the late Florida […]

Fever Longing Still is Paul Kelly’s most conventional long-player since 2017’s Life Is Fine. Co-produced by the artist with engineer Steven Shram–notably along with Kelly’s longtime band mates–a slate of a dozen original songs metamorphoses into the unified work of a bonafide recording artist by the conclusion of its forty-one-plus minutes. At its heart, this is the sound […]

Released less than six months after his eponymous Columbia Records debut, Johnny Winter’s sophomore album for the label (and third solo overall) put to rest the naysaying that arose after the prior title’s emergence.  In the aftermath of all the fanfare around the Texan’s mammoth signing bonus, the textbook takes on multiple blues styles comprising Johnny […]

Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis was one of the first of the old-time blues musicians of the 1920s to be brought out of retirement and given a new lease of recording life by the folk-blues revival of the 1960s. In the Mississippian’s early travels as a musician, he encountered a wide variety of like-minded performers, including Bessie Smith […]

Iain Matthews is hardly a household name, but he has had his share of flirtations with the mainstream throughout his sixty-year-plus career. Having exited English folk pioneers Fairport Convention, he formed Matthews Southern Comfort, with whom he had a hit in 1970 with Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” A decade later, following a move to Los Angeles […]

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1982 album Long After Dark deserves the expanded reissue treatment of its two-CD and one Blu-Ray package. A somewhat underappreciated entry into this great American rock and roll band’s lengthy discography, the ten tracks of the original edition—here remastered by Chris Bellman to resounding effect—receive further validation from the inclusion of a […]

Watching what is ostensibly the only existing film of Jimmy Reed compels the question of whether any other blues figure has created a more fully-formed persona through his songs (or has had more of his songs covered by a wider range of artists). Firm, resolute, and good-natured, Reed compels attention even the misconceived light show […]