Guitarist Colin James is known far better in his native Canada than he is south of the border. Frankly, he'd likely be just a name to this resident of the relative tropical zone (Minnesota) if not for the review CDs that show up regularly in my mail. There are, of course, good recordings by white blues musicians, but I've learned to be suspicious. Some turn out to be as much guitar-rock, which once defined the pop mainstream but is now out of fashion, as blues, and others are just -- literal -- pale imitation.

James knows blues and its history, and he manages to integrate tradition and innovation in a way that only the masters can get done. It's a sequel to his previous Blue Highways -- I reviewed it here on 29 October 2016 -- which surveyed the genre's Southern history from a far-North perspective. This time, that history encompasses Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Furry Lewis (oddly misidentified as "Lewis Furry," though I doubt that's James's fault), Walter Davis, Jessie Mae Robinson, Arthur Crudup, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, in short from early rural to mid-century urban, with stops between.

In so doing, James, who switches between acoustic and electric guitars, both honors and personalizes the art of the masters. The older material is arranged at varying degrees of distance from its assorted inspirations, but never so far away from James's own vision that his manifestly modern originals (all, modestly, two of them) sound gratingly out of place.

James lays all this down in front of a band of crackerjack string and horn men, plus superb backing vocals from the Sojourners and Colleen Rennison. It's as good a blues record as I expect to hear in 2018 from a white guy, proving that at its most fully realized and assembled blues surpasses color and speaks authentically from the voice of any artist gifted enough to discern its meaning and divine its secrets.