Newton-Blues.com

Really enjoyable and fun gig at the Lincoln Imp in Scunthorpe on Friday 22nd June. The small crowd was obviously made up of blues enthusiasts. They didn’t miss a note and I was very gratified to sell 4 of my cds at the end of the night. In my set I included Robert Petway’s great laid back blues ‘My Little Girl’ and also my own arrangement on slide of that great standard blues ‘I Can Tell’. Of late I have been including Memphis Minnie’s ‘Me and my Chauffeur’ blues. She has got a fantastic voice and the original can be heard on the ‘Century of the Blues’ compilation, a 4 cd set put out by Chrome Dreams cdcd5003. This a great set with the likes of Tommy Johnson, Tommy McLennan, Skip James, Lowell Fulson, Frank Stokes and many, many more.

It is strange that at gigs people keep asking me if I do much Dylan - I suppose I should take this as a big compliment. One record that I really would recommend to any blues aficionado is ‘The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan’ on Catfish Records 2000, KATCD168. This has got the hauntingly beautiful and heartrending Leadbelly track ‘Grasshoppers in My Pillow’ as well as other great numbers by the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Willie McTell, Rev J.C.Burnett amongst others. One of the two tracks by the Mississippi Sheiks is their version of ‘Sittin on top of the World’ and I absolutely love Bob Dylan’s ‘throwaway’ rendition of this number which can be found on Columbia’s ‘Good as I Been to You’. If anyone aspires to play this track you can get the tablature of Doc Watson’s open D version in Happy Traum’s ‘Finger-Picking Styles for Guitar’.

Since I have been touring around playing the blues - you know the ageing blueman all dressed in black who drifts into town around the tumbleweed and drifts out again on the wind (or is it with wind - I forget), I have come to appreciate one of Dylan’s aphorisms. In reference to his endless tours he said: ‘Night or Day, it doesn’t matter where I go anymore, I just go…A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it. I’m mortified to be on stage, but then again, its the only place you can be who you want to be’. Again, in his usual enigmatic style, Dylan says: ”There’s only one day at a time here, then its tonight and then tomorrow will be today again’. Wonderful eh? Hey Bob, keep on truckin’ for all our sakes.