Artist: New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers
Album: New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers VOL 2
Label: Stony Plain Records
Release Date: 03.26.21
The thing about the blues, it never gets old and it never gets new. It is what is, and when it’s played by those really who know how, be they old or young, it endures and shimmers. Here are two veteran blues men, Charlie Musselwhite and Jim “I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone” Dickinson, Jim’s surviving sons Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars, Jimbo Mathus who’s no longer caught in the Squirrel Nut Zippers, along with named-after-a-Chipmunk Alvin Youngblood Hart. Upon first hearing Hart play guitar, Taj Mahal commented, “That boys got thunder in his hands”
It seems that 14 years ago, these fine fellows all gathered at Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch studio for a pot luck jam session and they rolled tape on it. The tapes sat for well over a decade and now, on Vol 2 we find what did not fit on Vol 1, released last year. You can’t call this leftovers, just more of the good stuff comprised of originals and some standard bearers from Junior Wells, Jimmy Reed, Earl Hooker, as well as one from Charles Mingus that really caught my ear, “Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me” (but then I’ve always been a sucker for interesting titles ever since I flipped over “Rock Around The Clock” and discovered “Thirteen Women and Only One Man In Town” – BOOM !)
Perhaps this is best summed up by Jim Dickinson, who drove this blues bus and is quoted in the liner notes. “Like the scratches on the rock wall of some prehistoric cave, the recordings we leave behind are our immortality, our means of communicating with the future. This is an act of communion between you and us. Though we are separated by timed space as you listen, we are together.”
They may have picked a silly name, but these guys are definitely together.
—Ken Spooner
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