(Evidence)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
This solid hour of gloriously intimate, eclectic acoustic blues (with occasional drums by Freddie Below and backing vocals by producer Willie Dixon) is in fact a gathering of Chicago giant Lenoir's last two albums, on which -- like so many pre-war blues musicians in the '60s -- he asserts his artistic dominance and continued genius as a performer. These songs skirt all semblance of the then-modern electric blues, instead challenging and concentrating with the joyous agony of Robert Johnson or Mississippi John Hurt, but they are entirely absent of any sense of novel throwback. Instead, their stripped-down nature only makes them more relevant.
Lenoir, with a high-pitched, fevered tone that can render ecstasy (in the classic "I Feel So Good," revisited here) or pain, sings about black poverty and politics and Vietnam, some years before that would become the subject du jour among socially conscious musicians. He would die just a year after recording the last of these sessions, but it's a testament to their power that they completely hold their own alongside the wilder, more boisterous material of Howlin' Wolf. For all the songs' quiet drama and spareness, they are as alive as any lit-up Muddy Waters or B.B. King classic. (For the blues fan who believes the form has never reached a higher plane than the country blues of the '20s and '30s, Lenoir in fact seems the ideal '60s-era musician.)
The contrast of Lenoir's spirited enthusiasm with the starkness of his stabbing, nuanced, never ornate playing style allows his songs to seem strongly a part of a larger blues canon -- and to remain as timeless as a stack of 78's predating these recordings by four decades. It's as though no time had passed, and when he chirps out "every black child born in Mississippi / you know the poor child is born dead," you feel as though it still hasn't. A thoroughly immersive, emotionally wrenching listen.
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