Bill Neely – Texas Law & Justice
They don’t make ’em like Bill Neely anymore — but then, they didn’t make many like him even in his heyday. Born in 1916, Neely grew up in a sharecropping family in the flatlands north of Dallas, Texas. He began playing guitar around 1929, when he hustled up an impromptu lesson from Jimmie Rodgers, an experience he describes in “On A Blackland Farm”. But he also hung around black Dallas’ legendary Elm Street, where he saw the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly.
The deeply personal electric guitar style he eventually evolved injects the sound of those men, as well as black Texas songster Mance Lipsomb and black gospel great Pop Staples (from whom Neely adapted tremolo and reverb), into a foundation laid by Mother Maybelle Carter. His firm, propulsive runs swoop and surge with no-nonsense momentum, and are full of undertones and overtones that will convince you there has to be more than just one guitar, but there hardly ever is.
Meanwhile, Neely sings like a Marlboro Man with vulnerability. Though a walking encyclopedia of traditional songs, he began writing his own material in the late ’40s; when Arhoolie released his only album in 1974 — expanded on this CD reissue by nine tracks — a jug-bandy arrangement of “Deep Elm Blues” was the only trad-tune. Which makes for a fascinating batch of songs, as Neely yoked his distinctly old-school sensibility to more modern themes (consider “I’m A Truck Drivin’ Daddy”).
Accompanied on three songs by a second guitarist and on two more by a harmonica and bass, he picks and sings of apocalyptic religion (“Satan’s Burning Hell”), doomed and doleful love (“Crying The Blues Over You”), hard times (“Skid Row”) and good-timin’ jive (“Rock & Roll Baby”). He reflects on his own life and that of a distant relative who wrote the title song in 1930, just prior to being electrocuted for a crime of which he was later proven innocent. There’s also the dandy instrumental “Pflugerville Boogie” and the delightful Texas boast “Never Left The Lone Star State”.
Neely, who died in 1990, is a gem; thank God and Sam Houston and Chris Strachwitz that his work is finally available again.