Alvin Youngblood Hart – Start With The Soul
Linda Ray
Posted On July 1, 2000
Taj Mahal-like, Alvin Youngblood Hart continues to forage where he pleases. Start With The Soul finds him combining ’70s soul, rock and jazz in the company of Big Star and Replacements producer Jim Dickinson. Hart covers Chuck Berry’s “Back To Memphis”, Black Oak Arkansas’ “Cryin’ Shame”, and, with a dollop of Sly/Stone horns, the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose hit “Treat Her Like A Lady”. As if to turn back music to pre-album-rock radio, he also tosses in the Bakersfield country of the Dave Dudley hit “Cowboy Boots”, and a soupcon of Al DiMeola on “Electric Eel”.
In the main, Hart’s own contributions are of a piece with these electric relics, but salted subtly with the social commentary that picks up a lyric thread running through many of his originals: a sly and justifiably cynical view of personal and familial encounters with racism, from the perspective of a man preparing a young son to live with it.
Start With The Soul makes almost a suite of Hart’s three full-length releases. The first, Big Mama’s Door, like Mahal’s debut Natch’l Blues, was devoted to acoustic blues, stripped of decades of commercialism and sung with the kind of vigor, lust, joy, anger and heartache that likely inspired the earliest field recordings in the Delta. The follow-up, Territory, ranged from Lead Belly to Tin Pan Alley to the Grand Ole Opry.
Start With The Soul is more like the Fillmore, but while it proves Hart can do just about anything as well as anybody, it’s unfortunately at the expense of things he does better than everybody, and of things only he does at all. In the end, his cover of the traditional “Will I Ever Get Back Home”, howlin’ like the Wolf, makes you hanker to put on his debut; but his Tortoise-meets-Muddy-Waters “A Prophet’s Mission” makes you anticipate the record in which he takes on ’90s indie-rock.
