As I write this, it is the day before the first two singles on my new album, Dreamland, will be released. Unfortunately only one will be available for streaming until the full album comers out on September 16th. Notes get mixed up and things don’t have the same importance that they once did. That’s ok. They both will be released for radio play and I hope to have Hard Times and Shuga floating around the world through those Wolfman Jack repeaters Monday, August 24th. The beauty of radio and the beauty of music is there are no boundaries and borders to stop a signal from being heard. Now in the day of Satellite radio and streaming services those really don’t exist at all. If you happen to be near a radio station that plays my music or you use a pocket computer and hear these songs it should be obvious to the listener that I like a good story. I like enthusiastic partners in the making of the song process and I like a memory to be made. As usual my musicians accompanying me all were of the highest professional caliber. National, regional and local artists added to this sound.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room on these two songs. I was driving one afternoon in the hot Arkansas Delta summer near the forgotten and gone town of Gethsemane in north Jefferson County, Arkansas. I saw a figure in the road. What is the saying…. only mad dogs and Englishmen are out in this weather? This was neither. It was a solidly built woman in as tight of white pants and T-shirt as I have ever seen. The Arkansas Penitentiary was just up the road. Arkansas dresses their inmates in solid white so I expected that I was going to learn the life of being on the run, or dead in the ditch. After trying every way in the world to go around her, I finally gave in and asked what she wanted. A ride to the grocery store/juke joint in Tucker Arkansas. I asked her name, we will use Shuga, and asked if she had a gun. “Hell yes I do, but it’s back in the trailer” was the answer. The story is long and I couldn’t cover half of it in a song but somewhere in that car a new and important character by chance made his appearance on the screen of my phone. Bobby Rush called to ask about doing a recording (Hambone Stomp). Bobby is from about five miles from Gethsemane, Shuga is from Gethsemane and the conversation between them was very entertaining. So when you listen to this song put the image of Shuga in your mind and when you hear the unmistakable sound of Bobby Rush’s harmonica know the story is just beginning. I hope you enjoy my writing on this song, Shuga’s story, Jesse Aycock’s unbelievable distorted baritone bass and the great Bobby Rush playing harmonica on a song for a friend simply because I asked if he wanted too.
As we were sitting on the studio couch in Little Rock with the producer, journalist Richard Ledbetter, photographer Alan Mays and Bobby Rush listening to the results of Shuga, Bobby asked “what else ya got Homie”. I asked the producer to put on Hard Times. It was a gut bucket certified blues song that I had written from inspiration of a show in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Before our stage time we had gone to Ground Zero (we play there Halloween night this year) and they were doing a tribute to Skip James. All I could hear in my mind was the most blues song of blues songs, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, echoing around. I started writing my song on the way back to Arkansas. Bobby Rush IS the blues so when the first chords of Hard Times hit he was on the way to the microphone. What came out was a beautiful blues harp performance that set the song on a pedestal. Then he started harmonizing and eventually making up verses as he got more into the song. I hope to use those ad libs and verses another day and in another chapter. One can hope anyway.
I hope you like the insights of how these two songs were made. They both have an Arkansas Delta flavor to them. As we get closer to the full release date, keep an eye on my social pages and I will tell you about the song Used To be Blues that RJ Looney and I could have written a hundred verses to or about what really is a midnight situation, or what really causes Heat Lighting, or helping you to get to know Daddy Bruce from Pine Bluff and Denver. Or maybe what really happens in the Delta Blue and finally do I really wash the dirty river all over me?
Billy