Search - Kent Cooper :: The Blues & Other Songs, Vol. 2

Labor Records has announced a second release of collected songs by songwriter/lyricist Kent Cooper, entitled: "Vol. 2 The Blues and Other Songs." Eleven of the sixteen tracks are new, never before released material, which embody the range of this prolific lyricist. A powerful new blues singer, Deneen McEachern, opens the set with "Hard Dark Love," about a passionate attachment above any need for formalized marriage contracts. "McEachern deploys her full bodied larger-than-life voice in a forceful and gripping interpretation of "Black Sky El" (Rob Bowman), evoking a snowy night on Chicago's bleak Southside, where her man "has lost his way." Deneen's "Lover s Lament," comes from a woman who cannot bring herself to bury her lover: "They got them tombstones far as the eye can see, it's just not the place my baby needs to be."
George Higgs, winner of Living Blues' Country Album of the year award in 2002, and Jemima James, the great Boston area singer, join forces on "Walk All Over Georgia," a plaintive ode to love unknowingly crushed. It is apparent that Higgs and James have forged an instant classic in this number. Ms. James, whose ample voice has been described as "full throated and deep in the chest when she lets loose," gives a touching performance in "Tracking Through the Snow," a song that captures what Cooper has referred to as the isolation that too many women must endure and, hopefully, overcome. Ms. James' version of "Emergency Call," is the frantic bemoaning of a woman struck with the realization that she's lost her lover and needs a fast retreat back to her dead mother if necessary. Sonny Terry sings the wildly lamenting song "Selling Out," while Louisiana Red, aided and abetted by the fabulous Lefty Dizz, kicks up a storm on "Going Train Blues." (You can actually see and hear the train smoking down the hard steel highway.) Red is joined by Sugar Blue and Johnny Shines on "Red Sun," the story of a man waiting for a miracle to break him out of prison, so he can have "one more good drunk in town". Red has never sounded better nor been more impressive as on the tracks "Held Up In One Town" and "When My Mama was Living". The guitar wizard was at the top of his game when he cut these recordings, his voice a real standout in the pantheon of the blues. Cooper has said, "Few singers can get as much anguish into their voice as Louisiana Red. The way he sings "When My Mama was Living", you know the woman is sorely missed. You feel it yourself. Backed by the Cold Wind Band, George Higgs two numbers will garner this vintage singer an even greater audience. Higgs is the real thing, a man who has worked all his life at manual labor, and, until later years, played his music mostly for solace and for neighborhood friends. The richness and depth of Higgs' feelings are fully evident in the songs "The Unloving Kind" and "Somebody Tell Somebody". Cooper's songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as Eric Burdon of the Animals and Peg Leg Sam, the hobo harmonica sage. Cooper lived in the East Village in the Sixties and Seventies and was friends with most of the blues luminaries of the day, which included Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, John Lee Hooker (for whom he wrote the obituary for the Heritage Blues Society), Muddy Waters, Lonnie Johnson, Arthur Crudup, Johnny Shines, Roosevelt Sykes and a host of others. He is the author of a book on Sonny Terry and of the blues musicals "Deathwatch" and "Standing At Your Door," the latter of which starred Guy Davis in the l998 production