Louisiana Blues

Marcia Ball solidifed the favorable impression made with her debut Rounder effort with this rousing second outing. She dedicated it to the late King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, and was backed by a fine band of veteran pros that included saxophonist Alvin Tyler. Ball ripped through Booker T....

Recorded in New York with Tommy Tucker, Lowdown Back Porch Blues is Louisiana Red's first album and, in many ways, it's his best. Supported by a bare-bones rhythm section, Red plays a number or traditional tunes and originals. His guitar is nearly as powerful and overwhelming as his...

Tab Benoit's debut album Nice & Warm is a startingly fresh debut. The guitarist has a gutsy, fuel-injected style that adds real spice to his swampy blues. Benoit draws equally from the Louisiana and Texas traditions and Nice & Warm proves it; not only does he carry on the tradition,...

This album of snaky swamp rock is one of Ball's best recordings. Great choice of songs (she wrote 5 of the 13) that let her show all her talents, both vocally and instrumentally. Slow-tempo songs display the force of her voice, as in "I Still Love You," and another of the many...

Though purists may quibble about her interpretations of classic material, just about everyone acknowledges that Marcia Ball is one fine songwriter. Blue House contains eight gems of swamp boogie fusion delivered in Ball's supple, slinky voice. Listen to "The Facts of Life," a...

This is slide guitar wizard Sonny Landreth's most ambitious work, and true to form it comes with no glossy fanfare (even the packaging is sepia tinted), just straight-ahead, well-crafted songs played with his usual intelligent, heartfelt playing. Like the photos that are easily passed over...

Heritage of the Blues: The Best of Phillip Walker rounds up 12 highlights from his '70s and '80s Playboy, Joliet, Rounder, and High Tone recordings. The Louisiana-born, Texas-raised Walker made records that were gritty, yet they still remained solid, soul-inflected contemporary blues...

Iverson Minter, aka Louisiana Red, has an interesting sort of hybrid lues sound. His roots are in the Delta, as his raw and unadorned style makes quite clear. But whereas the stereotypical Delta blues sound is spare and dry, often featuring only acoustic guitar and voice, Louisiana Red's...

Louisiana journeyman swamp rocker Tab Benoit has been churning out an album a year since at least 2002, and between them he stays on the road playing every festival, club, and bar that'll have him. It would seem inevitable that the quality of these studio recordings would decline. But, at...

Louisiana slide master Sonny Landreth takes his time between releases -- his last studio disc of original material was five years prior to this -- but when they arrive, the wait seems justified. For the debut album on his own Landfall records, Landreth calls in marquee name guitarists Eric...

"Raw" is an overused and sometimes misapplied term of admiration, especially in the realm of the blues, where it is all too often used as a euphemism for "incompetent and off-key." In the case of Louisiana Red's Back to the Black Bayou, however, it's the only apt...

An instant classic when it was released as a double LP in the U.K. in 1970 by Mike Vernon's legendary Blue Horizon Records, Swamp Blues isn't technically an Excello Records product, but all of the veteran lues artists included in the set have strong ties to the Louisiana label. Vernon...

This CD is one of the most flukey and important live-blues documents you can find, rating right up there with B.B. King's Live at the Regal and the live Piano Red material from 1955. Recorded off the P.A. system at a 1961 show at the Sage Armory in Mobile, Alabama, it captures Slim Harpo in...

Lightnin' Slim (his real name was Otis Hicks) may have been the rawest artist in the Excello Records stable, and with a roster list that included Slim Harpo, Silas Hogan, and Lonesome Sundown, that's saying something. Slim's barely serviceable (but surprisingly effective) vocals...

Marcia Ball explored R&B and honky tonk country on this album, keeping her lues chops in order while expanding her repertoire. She included a pair of tunes by country vocalist Lee Roy Parnell,

A rumor circulated after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast at the close of summer in 2005 that Louisiana soul great Irma Thomas was one of the missing. The rumor, fortunately, turned out to be false -- she was gigging at the time in Austin -- but Thomas' New Orleans home was...

This CD is a delight for a DJ or party host wanting to serve up a gumbo of Louisiana music. Aptly titled Louisiana Spice, the two-volume set features musical artists from a variety of genres, from R&B to zydeco. The selections are guaranteed to raise the spirits of listeners. Those so...

The Goldband label is most known for the Cajun artists it recorded, such as Iry LeJeune and Cleveland Crochet, but it also put out releases by numerous blues musicians. These included some pretty respected, if secondary, blues notables like Lazy Lester, Lonesome Sundown, Juke Boy Bonner, Hop...