Down in the Alley Music

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by: Alvin Youngblood Hart

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Customer Reviews
Average Rating: Rating: - GREAT SOUND WHO ELSE CAN PLAY A GUITAR OR BANJO WITH A DIFFERENT COORDINATED RHYTM AND MELODIE. HE REMINDS ME ON A JUGGLER. Rating: - The Best! This is a wonderful CD. Alvin is back at what he does best. If you are an acoustic country blues fan. BUY THIS!! Easily the best acoustic blues album of 2002. Period. His version of Bukka White's "Change My Clothes" will blow you away with the wonderful cornfield holler falsetto. Damn! Rating: - downhome heart While of course Alvin Youngblood Hart has the right to do any kind of music he chooses, it would be hard to dispute that he does downhome African-American music best. He's in top form on this splendid recording, which harks back to the sound of his first. Like Lead Belly, Mississippi John Hurt, Henry Thomas, and Mance Lipscomb, he is a gifted bluesman but not only a bluesman. He is also immersed in the older rural traditions out of which the blues emerged a century or so ago. Thus, for two examples, the riveting renditions of the deep-folk songs "Deep Blue Sea" (not to be confused with the Tommy McClennan "Catfish Blues" variant of the same name) and "Chilly Winds." Though credited to Odetta, the latter is actually a cobbling-together of the title song (ubiquitous in both black and white tradition), "Pea Vine Whistle," and "K. C. Moan" -- themselves merely versions of older songs of murky origin. Hart not only revives the all-but-lost art of African-American five-string banjo but also masters it. The result is a sound nothing short of exhilarating. I like everything on this album, with one small qualification. Hart boldly takes on the masters, making even Charley Patton's "Tom Rushen Blues" beautifully his own. Yet Skip James defeats him, as James seems to defeat everybody who tries him. Hart's version of "Devil Got My Woman" isn't bad, but James's original has an otherworldly quality which manages always to evade capture or even reinvention. If somebody has ever done a better version of any James song than James himself, I have never heard it. This quibble notwithstanding, this is the sort of recording one has a very hard time taking off one's turntable. It should make all who hear it grateful that Hart is a relatively young man and that there's more -- plenty more, one hopes -- where it comes from.

Down in the Alley Music

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