Earlier this year, Craft Recordings released the 2CD compilation Birth Right: A Black Roots Music Compendium with the aim of introducing the astonishing variety and depth of black roots music in the US in just 40 songs. Historian Dr Ted Olson and producer Scott Billington have done a great job of presenting a wide range of styles and genres -- from trad jazz to gospel to Louisiana la-la to Gullah music to country blues to brass bands. It's a fascinating musical ride for the listener.
Taj Mahal. (Photo: John Clewley)
The compilers have avoided the usual suspects that feature on many black music compilations, and although the recordings here go back only to the 1950s, the music goes back much further than that as the opening track, the stomping Bourbon Street Parade by the legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band, suggests. New Orleans also features in the form of songs by Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Professor Longhair, accompanied by some brilliant songs from South Louisiana, led by zydeco legend Clifton Chenier on Ay-Tete Fee and Bois Sec Ardoin and Canray Fontenot with the jaunty, pre-zydeco Eunice Two Step.
There are field recordings as well, including an intriguing song recorded in 1973, Yonder Come Day by Bessie Jones, a Gullah singer from Georgia, and blues from well-known musicians like Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Lightin' Hopkins, Reverend Gary Davis and John Lee Hooker. Ranky Tanky by Ranky Tanky is another Gullah song -- the title and band name mean "get funky" in Gullah.
Contemporary musicians and groups also feature. Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' hit the blues with a cover of Diving Duck Blues, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops appear with their late mentor, Piedmont fiddler Joe Thompson, on previously unreleased track Georgie Buck. And there are surprises, too, like The Staples Singers' gospel call-and-response with dad, Pops Staples, on their 1963 release Motherless Children and Sweet Honey on the Rocks' Study War No More, otherwise known as Down By The Riverside.
This is an excellent introduction to the depth and richness of black American music, packed full of interesting songs and musical connections. The CDs come with liner notes by blues singer/guitarist Corey Harris (he sings Station Blues with Sharde Thomas on the album) and Carolina Chocolate Drops musician Don Flemons, handsomely illustrated with extensive track notes by Ted Olsen. Highly recommended.
Veteran bluesman Taj Mahal has been busy of late, not only appearing with Keb' Mo' on the Birth Right compendium but also garnering several awards for some of his most recent albums. His collaboration with fellow bluesman Keb' Mo', TajMo (2017), won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2018, while Get On Board (2022), for which he reunited with guitar maestro Ry Cooder for a tribute to the music of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, also won a Grammy in 2023 for Best Traditional Blues Album. He is currently touring the USA with Mo'.
Mahal is unique in the blues world, mainly because of his multicultural background. He grew up in rural Massachusetts in a musical household. His father was an Afro-Caribbean pianist and jazz arranger, while his mother sang in gospel choirs. Both his parents were raised during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s and they taught the young musician to be proud of his Afro-Caribbean heritage. His exposure to many kinds of music at an early age had a profound effect on his musical choices -- this is why he has recorded many kinds of music from children's songs to Caribbean to Hawaiian to African, with plenty of blues in between.
Still rocking at 81, Mahal's latest release Savoy (Stony Plain, 2023) sees him return to his youth and the big sound of swing, which he heard at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, a hugely popular New York venue that operated from 1926 to 1958. In the poem, Juke Box Love Song, Langston Hughes called the club, the "Heartbeat Of Harlem". Big bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Chick Webb would vie for popularity in "cutting contests" and the latest dance crazes from lindy hop to rhumboogie to snakehips were often created in the influential venue.
Perhaps the most famous song about the Savoy is Stompin' The Savoy, the 1933 jazz standard written by Edgar Sampson, which kicks off the album. John Simon, who worked with Mahal back in the 60s and 70s, arranged the tracks and co-produced the album. Mahal sweeps through a set list of standards with his distinctive deep emotive voice -- sounding here somewhere between Charles Brown and Big Joe Turner.
Highlights include his cover of Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo, Is You Or Is You Ain't My Baby and the sassy Sweet Georgia Brown. But the tracks I really liked are the uptempo "jump jive" songs like Louis Jordan's classic Caldonia, on which Mahal replaces Jordan's saxophone sound with blues harmonica, which he also adds to great effect on Killer Joe.