Homesick James
Blues on the South Side

THE REVIEW

This is the story of a terrible musician, who disappeared from the scene for a good year and returned playing like a God, composing epochal pieces that spoke of crossroads, hellhounds, and Judgement Day. That man apparently had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical talent.

Sorry, that's another story. The rustic we're talking about is a certain Homesick James, with a background unknown to me, apparently (according to the cover notes) a true authority in the field of bottleneck slide guitar, a virtuoso of the cutting sound.

This live LP "Blues On The South Side" indeed offers a canonical electrified blues, with swinging and danceable accents. The voice, rough and graceless, screams raw over a boogie piano and a bouncing rhythm. Almost impossible for an inexperienced ear to prefer one track over another, they are little three-minute songs in which, as usual in the genre, the leader mourns the woman of his life that he loves, but she belongs to another man. Alternatively, he sings about the sexual prowess (in a veiled manner) of his lover. Or perhaps, the passion for dancing and liquor. It's curious and somewhat gaudy how the themes remain the exact same as the early rural blues of the '20s (the work in question is from the mid-'60s).

A work like this can offer the listener the chance to imagine the typical smoky environment of a bar in a Southern town, with a crowd in rhythmic agitation and band on stage dressed in grayish jackets and dark ties, cigarette in mouth and rum on the piano. And let's not forget that cats are more independent than dogs. Little to say about the music, identical to itself and a thousand others, but damnably pleasant.