Disc Reviews: 'Home Sweet Home' is home run for String Band

South Memphis String Band

Home Sweet Home

South Memphis String Band

Memphis International Records

They each occasionally trade in modern, even cutting-edge forms, but members of the new super-trio the South Memphis String Band — North Mississippi Allstars and Black Crowes guitarist Luther Dickinson, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Alvin Youngblood Hart, and Squirrel Nut Zipper and solo artist Jimbo Mathus — are deeply aware of the primacy of the blues in American music. It’s that shared respect for the roots that has led them to collaborate on a variety of projects over the years.

But it’s a safe bet that none of them has ever recorded anything as faithfully, as stubbornly traditional as this debut, a tribute to the old jug and string bands like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Mississippi Sheiks that dominated the South in the early 20th century.

Swapping around acoustic guitar, Dobro, mandolin, and banjo, singing into a shared microphone, with only the occasional foot stomp or hand clap to pound home the beat, the trio tear through reverent, deep-felt renditions of public domain tunes like “Jesse James” as well as classics by bluesman Blind Willie Johnson (“Let your Light Shine On Me”) and country forefather A.P. Carter (“Dixie Darling”) that illustrate the common threads in the two genres. They even introduce some of their own compositions, like Mathus’ “Worry ’Bout Your Own Backyard,” indistinguishable from the real thing. Not a substitute for going back and discovering groups like the Sheiks, this canny recreation is hopefully just an introduction to the music at the core of everything else.

Orphan

Above Only

Self-released

A recent concert by the reformed Little Rock Christian death metal band Living Sacrifice at the Abbey, the new music hall beneath the Lifelink Church in Cooper-Young, pointed out the inherent silliness of the whole proposition of rocking for Christ. It’s kind of hard to receive a message of salvation and redemption when its being shouted at you and rammed home by sugared up slam dancers. (That said, it should be noted that Living Sacrifice, more than 20 years after their first founding, remain one of the few “Christian” bands who can hang on a secular level with the best hard rockers around.)

If you really need to have your religion and rock mixed together, it makes more sense to go the route of Above Only, a Memphis quartet in the vein of Creed and Shinedown, whose big soaring hooks provide an nice contemporary parallel to the melodies of traditional hymns. After releasing an EP last year, the four-piece have just released a new seven-song collection, Orphan. The new record is a slick, big sounding affair, a dated but passable entry in the increasingly bland mainstream rock genre. The rhythm section of drummer Chad Yarger and bassist Brent Ruffin show great inventiveness in supporting the crunching leads of guitarist Tim Dills. But the real standout is lead singer Sam Ward, who arena-ready voice delivers messages of hope without getting too preachy.

The Ladies Man

T-Model Ford

Alive Records

In the late ’90s, buoyed by the late-in-life success of regional blues legends Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, the Oxford, Miss., label Fat Possum scoured the state looking for apparently any and every unrecorded old guitar player they could find. Most of their discoveries were marginal talents at best and quickly disappeared, but T-Model Ford — a convicted murderer whose braggadocio far outstripped his skill on the guitar, an instrument he admittedly only picked up when he was 58 — has beaten the odds to become one of the last of his kind.

Facing down his 90th year (no one, including him, is sure of his exact age), Ford’s seventh and arguably best record is his first all acoustic set. Cut in one day in Wichita, Kan., in 2008, with minimal accompaniment from sometime backing band GravelRoad (Ford split with longtime partner, drummer Tommy Lee “Spam” Miles, some years back), the session has none of the raucous punk energy with which he’s identified. Instead, he delivers warm, assured, and playful performances of old blues standards by Muddy Waters and Little Walter, and his own compositions, including the signature “Chicken Head Man.”

The precious snippets of studio chatter interspersed among the songs feel a little too much like the much younger guys in charge of the session showing off their old blues guy. But the revealing of the softer side of this notorious hell raiser is more than worth the petulance.

© 2010 Go Memphis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.