Dale wrote:Ok, it turns out to be a tie.
R. L. Burnside: "Burnside on Burnside"
Scott Dunbar: "From Lake Mary"
That is all.
I was curious to find out why Dale made such seemingly odd choices. So I decided to get the albums and find out for myself. (No, you haven't just discovered a marketing strategy that will always work on me.
)
The Burnside turns out (to my ears) to be a fairly routine live set, played by a fairly routine electric blues band, probably in a fairly routine juke joint on a fairly ordinary saturday night. It's nice and sweaty and the rapport with the audience is there. Good, but, for me, a long way short of great.
The Scott Dunbar is something else entirely. Lovely, unpretentious slide guitar blues played very well but loosely in a back porch setting (literally.) Dunbar was nudging 70 at the time of the recording. He still hadn't lost something of the songster attitude and repertoire that would have been the norm when he was growing up. For me an utterly magical recording.
In a sense, the essence of the blues for those for whom it was originally recorded wasn't about making artistic works or lasting statements. It was about entertaining yourself and your family on the back porch at night and about entertaining the community in the juke joint on a saturday night. These records capture that essence as well as any, although I think a lot of commercial electric blues get the juke joint feel down as well as Burnside without actually having been made in one.
So I have one new record I regard as an absolute classic and another I like. I might grow to like it even better. Thanks, Dale.
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