Label: Geffen Sound/Style: Classic blues, reinvigorated and dust-free despite the historical emphasis
By Steve Morley
They may call it the blues, but it’s a form of music that comes in many different shades. The style—itself a musical mongrel that gestated over decades, if not centuries—underwent endless permutations as it migrated across America from the rural South in the early 1900s. By the 1940s, when Mississippi-born guitarist B.B. King was first beguiled by the blues, the music had evolved into several distinct regional forms. Over time, King developed a style that combined the most accessible of these far-reaching blues varieties. This fact goes a long way toward explaining his long-lasting, boundary-crossing popularity in a genre that generally lacks mass appeal. Today, at age 83, the iconic musician might be excused for coasting. But his latest release, One Kind Favor, asks no such indulgence on the part of the listener, as King injects remarkable vigor into a dozen decades-old blues tunes, creating perhaps the most defining statement of his latter-day career.
Considering the streamlined, populist brand of blues King favors, his new record features a surprisingly scrappy sound. On cuts like “I Get So Weary” and “How Many More Years,” drums and stand-up bass rumble like an after-hours nightclub session, and King exchanges his clean, stinging lead guitar sound for a blunt, sometimes ragged bite. King is at ease and in his element here, but he works the fretboard as if the kids need new shoes and breaks a sweat on the more demanding vocal numbers, attacking the lyrics in a harsh rasp. Being vintage lyrics, they don’t comment on current events. But they don’t have to, because the feelings expressed in the blues are as old as humanity itself.
There’s nothing outdated about the despair and displacement described in “Backwater Blues,” which could as easily be about today’s hurricane refugees. (“When it’s thunderin’ and lightnin’ and the wind begin to blow/ There are so many poor people that didn’t have no place to go.”) Relationship problems dominate the subject matter, but always from the vantage point of one who has endured wrongs. The character in “Get These Blues Off Me,” after trying unsuccessfully to address his grievances, still shows humility on his way out the door. (“Oh, please don’t be angry with me, baby/ Because I’m goin’ away/ I told you all about your mistakes, baby/ But you didn’t hear a word, not a word I said.”) The disheartened lovers on these tracks are essentially seeking righteousness, and their weariness testifies to the burden of living in a fallen world.
King never realized his ambition to become a guitar-playing preacher like the one in his Mississippi boyhood church. Nonetheless, his desire to serve has been fulfilled in his 60-odd years of transforming trouble and sorrow into a transcendent and often-joyful experience. Here, he reaffirms his role as ambassador of the blues while also honoring innovators that paved his way. But if One Kind Favor reminds that B.B. didn’t write the book on blues, the record’s impressive overview proves that he’s still the best at editing it.
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