Jorma Kaukonen – Blue Country Heart

The 1920s and ’30s produced a tremendous outpouring of rural country music, its main practitioners Southern white musicians such as Jimmie Rodgers, Cliff Carlisle, the Delmore Brothers and Jimmie Davis. All of them borrowed significantly from the blues tradition of the South’s black culture. Fingerpicker extraordinaire Jorma Kaukonen, of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna fame, has tapped into that spirit with Blue Country Heart.

Joined by ace musicians Sam Bush (mandolin), Jerry Douglas (dobro), Byron House (upright bass), and Bela Fleck (banjo), Kaukonen captured the warm, old-timey, back-porch feel of classics such as Rodgers’ “Waiting For A Train” and the Delmores’ “Blues Stay Away From Me” by using vintage instruments during the recording sessions, which took only four days.

Especially noteworthy are Kaukonen’s spectacular fretboard work and the smoking call-and-response interplay among Fleck, Douglas and Bush on the Shelton Brothers’ ultimate kiss-off tune, “Just Because”. Elsewhere, Kaukonen tackles politically-themed songs, most notably on Slim Smith’s “Breadline Blues”, a Depression-era anthem whose bouncy rhythm doesn’t detract from its cut-to-the-chase lyrics: “It’s a rich man’s job to make some rules/In order to rid my breadline blues.”