(2021) Corey Harris - The Insurrection Blues


Review:
Insurrection Blues is the 20th album for blues artist Corey Harris but his first in over three years and first for the M.C. label. Harris went back to the roots of American blues as well as unearthing traditional West African tunes, reflecting the year the spent there. He takes traditionals on four of the fourteen while others come from originators Charlie Patton, Blind Blake, and Skip James. Harris penned four, including the title track which we’ll get to shortly. Harris recorded mostly alone on acoustic guitar in Italy during the pandemic lockdown, in the same style he began with as a street singer in New Orleans in the early 1990s. Lino Mudio contributes mandolin on “When Did You Leave Earth” and Phil Wiggins joins on harmonica for “That Will Never Happen No More.” Beginning with the traditional tune often associated with Reverend Gary Davis, “Twelve Gates of the City,” Harris weaves gospel, Delta blues, and the roots of these forms in an acoustic tour de force worthy of the MacArthur Fellowship and honorary music doctorate from his alma mater, Bates College in Maine. Tunes such as “Toubaka” and “Sunjata” are purely instrumental, depicting his finger picking skills and the rhythms he absorbed from his time spent in West Africa, which he further exemplifies in his own guitar-and-vocal “Mama Africa,” where he infuses the vocal with trance-like chants. He follows that with an arrangement of Skip James’ “Special Rider Blues,” showing how so closely connected the African forms are to this Mississippi style, called Bentonia blues, and then cementing that exhibit of sorts with the African “Sunjata.” After this segment, this is a brief interlude with Harris replaying sound bites from January 6th before delivering the title track. Harris is one of only two artists that this writer is aware of so far, that have taken the events of the insurrection to song; jazz vocalist Paul Jost (who just released his amazing While You Were Gone) being the other. Here Harris both sings and delivers spoken word in the tune he has subtitled “Chickens Come Home to Roost” in a style not unlike the African kinds that preceded it. Commenting Harris says, “…As an African American living in America, as a descendant of slaves that built this country, I am looking at the survival mechanisms that have existed for people to persevere in difficult times. And when we think about that, the blues always comes to mind. When I saw the insurrection, I saw how race and history collided there. For instance, the way that the Black Capitol police were being assaulted physically—The symbolism of that was quite heavy, particularly since it was a Black man who saved the life of Mitt Romney (among others) by delaying the entry of the aggressors.” After this, the mood lightens with “Boats Up River”and “By and By” before the takes on two Blind Blake tunes – “You Gonna Quit Me Baby” and “That Will Never Happen No More,” with his own instrumental “Afton Mountain Blues” with Phil Wiggins sandwiched in between. It’s almost as if the second Blake tune is a sarcastic response to the title track. The album concludes with his own “Scottsville Breakdown,” a lively picked instrumental, augmented by humming and wordless vocals, leaving us on an optimistic note. As he says on his website, Insurrection Blues is further evidence that Harris has one foot in tradition and the other in contemporary themes. It’s important to have an activist voice married with these traditional forms. Symbolically it’s a reminder that, sadly, for the oppressed, the struggle continues through several generations. The past is very much present.





Track Listing:
1.Twelve Gates To The City
2.Some Of These Days
3.When Did You Leave Heaven
4.Toubaka
5.Mama Africa
6.Special Rider Blues
7.Sunjata
8.Insurrection Blues (Chickens Come Home to Roost)
9.Boats Up River
10.By And By
11.You Gonna Quit Me Baby
12.Afton Mountain Blues
13.That Will Never Happen No More
14.Scottsville Breakdown


Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, blues
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits