In her late career Rory Block has been issuing a series of recordings honoring downhome-blues artists who influenced her as she pursued a performing life as a singer-guitarist from the folk era up to the present. I have reviewed all but one in this space (most recently, her Bukka White tribute Keepin' Outta Trouble on 3 December 2016). It goes without saying that the project looks alarmingly ambitious. After all, these guys, among them Rev. Gary Davis, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, were all towering presences in African-American traditional music and influences on black and white musicians of several generations. That Block's undertaking has succeeded is a consequence of her consummate skills and rich imagination.

Block understands, to start with, that you do the material your way. You certainly have a debt to the spirit of this sturdy music, but since the originals are freely available, there is no point in simply recreating them. But even if they weren't attainable, copying them note for note (and some modern hacks are still doing that) is an exercise in aesthetic sterility. So how to make the music live in new skin? With each passing release in this series, Block has answered the question so strikingly that you can have heard all of the old records -- as I have; you'll get to all of them if you listen determinedly and widely enough -- and never think to compare their relative worths. They're discrete entities to be embraced on their own.

Block's instrument is the acoustic guitar, as it was (with the rare electrical excursion) her models'. Bessie Smith (1894-1937), who is the subject of A Woman's Soul, is known only as a vocalist, on the other hand, and jazz bands and pianists backed her. Though more than most female singers who popularized blues for the mainstream audience of their time, she incorporated rural sounds into her overall approach. In transferring these songs into the folk-blues idiom, however, Block is at another remove from Smith's arrangements. She is not the first white folk singer to do as much, of course. Like many of my contemporaries, my introduction to Smith was through the late Dave Van Ronk. (Contrast her reading of "Black Mountain" with Van Ronk's.) Other Smith tributes I've heard stick to the jazz-band format. Block eschews that to outstanding effect. Smith doesn't need an imitator, and Block isn't one.

A Woman's Soul is the first of several intended to revive the repertoires of famous and neglected female blues artists. It's a more than auspicious start, and it has me looking forward to the next installment.

I reviewed Steve Howell & the Mighty Men's Friend Like Me here on 21 November 2015. I liked it a whole lot. It wasn't just the good songs (from blues and folk traditions) but the attitude: no pretense, a wonderfully attractive groove, Howell's casual, back-porch vocals. Electric bands have played this kind of material many times, obviously, but Howell and compadres find a way to do it that sounds as perfectly attuned to the heart of this music as one could wish for.

This time around, a Mighty Woman, Katy Hobgood Ray, joins them, and things get even more inspired. Maybe you think you've heard "Easy Rider" countless times as done by everybody from Lead Belly to anonymous bar bands, but you will want to hear what she and the boys do with it over 6:20 gloriously revelatory minutes. You may have to lie down afterwards. They take you places that you didn't know were there.

On another subject, though: that title. If you know anything that is likely to concern a Rambles.NET reader, you know that Bob Dylan recorded Good As I Been to You in 1992. Like this Good As I Been to You, it assembles a line-up of venerable trad and near-trad songs. One of them, Blind Blake's "You're Gonna Quit Me Blues" (1927), provides the title line. I have no idea what Howell had in mind, though I have no quarrel with his handling of the song itself, as able as Dylan's. Whatever may have motivated him, I do hope Howell knows what he's doing. Though Dylan has committed major felonies -- that's intentional hyperbole, Bob -- where musical (and other artistic) theft is concerned, he is notably devoid of humor or collegiality when someone else presumes to adapt any idea, however inconsequential, of his own. Maybe Howell should have reworked the title to Strange As You Been to Us.

There is one short of a dozen cuts. I am fond of nearly every one of them, especially though not confined to Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Bad Luck Blues" and Lead Belly's "When I Was a Cowboy (Out on the Western Plains)," recognizable enough but done irresistibly here. Therefore, I lapse into grumpiness only reluctantly, in full awareness that my continuing allegiance to certain cheesy pop songs of my youth is as without rational foundation as Howell's. But jeez, really ... the old Gene Pitney hit "It Hurts To Be in Love"? Hearing it now reminds me (1) it's been a long time since the last time, and (2) the song in the original barely exists as anything but a testament to bombast, both Pitney's ear-piercing vocal and the beat-the-point-to-a-bloody-pulp production. Well, at least now it won't be on the next Steve Howell album.