The legendary James Cotton played the TLA on Friday, September 6th for the final concert of XPN’s Mississippi Blues Project. The 78 year old blues man performed with the energy of a twenty-something to a sold out crowd, playing songs from his new album, Cotton Mouth Man, along with some classics including “Got My Mojo Workin'” that you can watch below. Listen to the entire concert here. The Mississippi Blues Project has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

The legendary James Cotton is playing a free show at the TLA on South Street in Philadelphia on Friday, September 6. It’s the finale concert of the year long Mississippi Blues Project and will be hosted by Jonny Meister, host of The Blues Show on WXPN. In addition to James and his band playing a full set, the evening will also feature a Funky Friday Dance party with David Dye. In between Funky Friday and James Cotton’s set, Jonny Meister will be spinning the blues. James has an excellent new album on Alligator Records, Cotton Mouth Man that features special guests Gregg Allman, Joe Bonamassa, Ruthie Foster, Delbert McClinton, Warren Haynes and Keb Mo.

The event at the TLA is free, but you need to sign up. Go here to RSVP for the show.

We’re saddened to hear that James “T-Model” Ford has passed away. He was 94. Born James Lewis Carter Ford in Forest, Mississippi. T-Model was a hard hitting and raw sounding Delta bluesman. While he played music for most his life, it wasn’t until the mid-1990’s the he played outside of Mississippi and released his debut on Fat Possum records in 1997, Pee-Wee Get My Gun. Go here for his discography. Below, check out a couple videos of Ford.

Below, from our session with David Bromberg, watch him perform “Kind-Hearted Woman,” and “Wee Midnight Hours.” You can listen to the full session here.

Below, listen to a Spotify playlist of Mississippi Blues artists. Listen to the first volume of the Mississippi Blues Project playlist here.

Rory Block, who performed a concert for the Mississippi Blues Project, has released Avalon: A Tribute To Mississippi John Hurt on Stony Plain Records. The album is the fourth CD in her “Mentor Series.” Previous tribute have been to Rev. Gary Davis (I Belong to the Band), Mississippi Fred McDowell (Shake ’em on Down) and Son House (Blues Walkin’ Like a Man). Stream the album below from Spotify. From her biography:

“Mississippi John Hurt was a truly unique artist,” says Block, the most celebrated living female acoustic blues artist. “He left a resounding impact on our musical landscape. We think of him as outwardly mellow, sweet, and as one writer described it, singing in a ‘whisper.’ But have you pondered the words? Alongside gospel material, this gentle man sang about sex, murder, mystery, violence and steamy sensuality. It gets ever deeper the more you listen.

“Most people finger pick simply, carefully, and with enough volume to be heard and enjoyed. But next to the masters we can find ourselves tinkling away while the train pulls out of the station. Mississippi John Hurt bounced rhythmically from side to side while he was playing – did this bounce add power and jauntiness to the notes, or did his extra strong attack on the strings create the bounce? We can never do polite versions of these songs if we want to capture some of the power that made the originals great and enduring.”

Rory Block’s connection to Mississippi John Hurt goes back fifty years when they met in 1963. She continues:

“In December of 1963, I met Mississippi John Hurt at a concert in New York which also featured the great Old Timey musician Doc Boggs,” she recalled in her autobiography, When a Woman Gets the Blues. “We went backstage as we always did. Stefan Grossman was part of the accepted insiders group and we never needed special passes. Hurt’s presence was shy and gentle. His face was beautifully weather beaten; he wore a signature hat, and always had a mellow smile. I loved the way he rocked around when he played… it was a bounce that started slow and built up to a strong pace that carried the music. He had his own way of doing this – I never saw anyone else with this exact style of moving and playing. At times when I am performing I feel this energy come over me: the Mississippi John Hurt bounce energy.

I think it interesting to note that Mississippi John Hurt covered many Appalachian country songs,” adds Block. “This just underscores the exchange of musical styles that was going on in the early 1900s which few people understood. Mississippi John Hurt knew musicians who played Appalachian music (Doc Boggs for example), and many of the Old Timey players knew the blues pickers. At the age of 14, sitting on the porch of an old wood frame house in North Carolina, I heard Clarence Ashley say, ‘I learned this one from an old blues player’ and I heard Mississippi John Hurt talk about the country fiddle players he knew. What we have in the end is a true melting pot which included music from Africa, the British Isles, Flamenco (Hurt referred to open G tuning as ‘Spanish’), folk, jazz, popular contemporary music of the day, and probably even Classical music, to name some of the sources.”

Purchase Avalon: A Tribute Mississippi John Hurt here.

Listen to Rory’s Mississippi Blues Project concert here.

Listen to this special Mississippi Blues Project session with David Bromberg here.

David Bromberg dropped by the studios at WXPN in Philadelphia in April to talk about, and play, Mississippi Blues. Bromberg cited the influences of players such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, though he noted that Big Bill Broonzy had been an initial influence. Broonzy used to say that he had come from Scott, Mississippi, but actually he was from Arkansas. Bromberg describes discovering Muddy Waters from his tribute album to Broonzy, which surprised Bromberg because the songs were performed so differently from the Broonzy originals by Muddy Waters.

We talked about Robert Johnson, with Bromberg noting that in his time Johnson was not well known. Producer John Hammond had sought Johnson for the famous “From Spirituals To Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939, but when looking for him in 1938, Hammond found that he had died (and Big Bill Broonzy was ultimately selected in his stead). Bromberg performed the Robert Johnson song “Kindhearted Woman Blues.”

We also talked about how he takes songs like “Kindhearted Woman Blues” and does them his own way, not trying to copy the originals. Bromberg remembered hearing a performer singing “Big Bill’s Blues,” and referring to himself in the song as “Bill.” Bromberg wondered why the performer didn’t use his own name in the places where Broonzy had used his name in the original. After all, the performer’s name wasn’t Bill Broonzy. For Bromberg, the trick is to own the song yourself, at least while you are playing it.

We reminisced about another influence, someone who was actually around in the New York City area from whom Bromberg learned a lot, Reverend Gary Davis. Davis was from South Carolina and is usually classified as an “Piedmont style” artist, but his influence on the folk and blues revival artists such as Bromberg, as well as Rory Block and many others, was tremendous.

I asked Bromberg who his favorite Mississippi artist was, expecting it would be Robert Johnson, but he named Skip James instead. We talked about Skip, how unusual it was for a Mississippi artist to be very talented on both guitar and piano, and how eerie and distinct Skip James’s sound was on both instruments. When I asked Bromberg if he could play a song by Skip James, he essentially said that it is still on the “to do” list for him to learn a Skip James song! We briefly mentioned another favorite artist of his, and mine, King Solomon Hill, who only made a few recordings, haunting blues pieces on slide guitar, often employing falsetto singing. Bromberg says he cannot play any of those pieces at this time. While King Solomon Hill is a fairly obscure figure at this point, he must have enjoyed some popularity with blues audiences during his life, because years later Big Joe Williams was telling interviewers that he was actually King Solomon Hill (not at all true! King Solomon Hill’s actual name was Joe Holmes.)

While Robert Johnson wasn’t actually popular during his lifetime, Leroy Carr, a pianist and singer who often recorded with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, definitely was. Bromberg performed one of their songs, the “Midnight Hour Blues,” and in the middle embedded the well-loved guitar part from a piece called “Mississippi Blues” which was originally performed by William Brown in a field recording in 1942.

The mixing of songs works perfectly for David Bromberg. He likes to mix different styles and is not slavishly devoted to doing the exact-copy renditions of old recordings, as some blues players have been. The subject of blues singer Johnny Shines came up. Shines traveled with Robert Johnson for many years. He shared some memories of Johnson with Bromberg back in the day, noting that Johnson could pick up songs very quickly from the radio. Shines and Johnson might be talking, with a song on in the background, and subsequently Johnson would pick up his guitar and could play the song – – somehow he had learned it while having a conversation at the same time!

Johnny Shines was a truly powerful blues singer, and in 1974 Bromberg produced one of his albums. It was important to Bromberg not to try to cast Shines as someone straight out of the 1930s. “I didn’t put him on a bale of hay, in dungarees with a straw hat on,” notes Bromberg. The album has a fully contemporary feel to it, and we decided to play one song directly from it in this session, a song called “Mr. Cover Shaker.”

We talked about the old 78 RPM records, many of which were not yet reissued when Bromberg started listening to the blues. Fortunately, the father of one of his friends had a big 78 collection, and Bromberg got to listen to them. Another topic was Clarksdale, Mississippi and the surrounding area, from which so many great blues artists came from. Bromberg wondered if there was something in the water around there! Among the artists from the area was John Lee Hooker whose hypnotic one-chord pieces were very different from the sound of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and such. Bromberg met Hooker in New York at folk clubs in Greenwich Village and used to perform some of the songs, though he said it is been a while and declined to do one at this point.

Instead, he decided to play a song by Big Bill Broonzy. The song he played is known by several titles. I have known it as the “Mule Ridin’ Blues,” though Bromberg remembers it being called the “Hey Bub Blues” on one album. It’s an example of Broonzy’s sense of humor.

We discussed the folk revival and how exciting it was to meet some of the original blues musicians in and around New York in the 1960s and 70s, as well as some of the other blues players in the revival. Artists such as Big Joe Williams, Lonnie Johnson, and Skip James, as well as Mississippi Fred McDowell, frequently played at The Gaslight, a fabled club in Greenwich Village where Bromberg spent time as the regular opening act. Bromberg notes the influence of Lonnie Johnson to B. B. King. Johnson’s distinct tone was the model for King’s sound, even though he played electric guitar and Johnson’s classic recordings had been on acoustic guitar.

Rory Block has told me how grateful she was, after being turned down by the Philadelphia Folk Festival one year, that Bromberg had invited her play on stage with him as a guest at the festival. When I mentioned that, Bromberg said he doesn’t actually remember it! Block, of course, will never forget it.

We also talked about the “hill country” blues styles for Mississippi, exemplified in recent years by R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough among others. Bromberg dug a little deeper into that tradition, talking about the fife and drum traditions found in the hill country, and remembering players such as Sid Hemphill, noting that some of these traditions seem to come right from Africa.

Bromberg played the “Big Road Blues,” a song he learned from the recording by Tommy Johnson, who also gave us the “Canned Heat Blues.” The walking bass line on it is very engaging – and those strong bass lines have always appealed to Bromberg.

We ended our visit with some conversation about strumming (as opposed to picking) exemplified by Charley Patton, though Bromberg feels he isn’t really up to speed on the technique at this point. We also talked about the ups and downs of his own performing career. Bromberg stopped playing for two decades. He had suffered from burnout following relentless traveling and years on the road, and started studying the making, appraising, and selling of violins. He talked about the quality of instruments and whether the incredibly high-priced instruments we sometimes read about are really worth that much. He noted that the value is often more a result of how the player experiences the instrument than the listener. Today he has a store where he repairs and sells violins, and is one of the world’s leading expert on violins made in America, which have often been overlooked by violin aficionados. He plays gigs when he wants to, but will never again be a burned-out “road warrior” performer, choosing to make the experience of playing music as much fun as the music itself.

Listen to the session

Award winning Blues guitarist and singer Super Chikan and the Fighting Cocks made the trip from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi to Philadelphia last Thursday, May 16 in a double header Mississippi Blues Project concert as part of WXPN’s Non-COMMvention with the Homemade Jamz Blues Band. Born James Louis Johnson in Darling, Mississippi in 1961, Johnson got his name from working with chickens on his family’s farms, moving around the Mississippi Delta until they settled in Clarksdale. You can listen to the entire performance of Super Chikan and the Fighting Cocks here via the WXPN media player. Photos by Mike Lynch, mikelynchphoto.com

Last Thursday during XPN’s Non-COMMvention, the Tupelo, Mississippi brothers and sister trio, the Homemade Jamz Blues Band, performed in concert with Super Chikan for the final Mississippi Blues Porject concert series. The band performed songs from its new album, Mississippi Hill Country. The band, featuring Ryan (guitar/vocals), Kyle (bass) and Taya (drums), played a fun and spirited set. You can listen to the band’s full set here via the XPN media player. Photo by Mike Lynch, mikelynchphoto.com.

Homemade Jamz Blues Band set list
1. Blues Train
2. Buy One Get One Free
3. Burned Down the House
4. If Home is Where the House Is
5. Voodoo Woman
6. Red Eye Flight
7. Ain’t No Sunshine
8. Mississippi Hill Country
9. Pay Me No Mind
10. Washing Clothes
11. So Many Tears

Rory Block performed a special concert at World Cafe Live during the XPN Music Film Festival on Saturday, April 13th. Listen to the concert here.