Goin’ Home (Concord, 2014)
Seething with hard-driving rhythms, low-slung riffs, meaty turns of phrase and enough slick, sharp-edged guitar lines to please even the most discerning blues fan, Goin’ Home by Kenny Wayne Shepherd, out now on the Concord label, is a sizzling, roiling, blistering ride on the blues.
Riding on a career that includes recordings like 10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads, How I Go, Trouble Is and Ledbetter Heights, this self-taught guitarist and vocalist, along with members of the Double Trouble Band, has played with the likes of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, John Dee Holeman, Etta Baker, Buddy Flett, B.B. King and blues harp man Jerry “Boogie” McCain.
Returning to his native Shreveport, Louisiana to record Goin’ Home in just 11days, Mr. Shepherd revisits tunes of blues idols such as B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Muddy Waters and as luck would have it he’s rounded up a whole host of guest artists for the ride.
Careening down the blues road with kick ass drums, badass bar room vocals and guitar licks so sharp I’m pretty sure I’ve got paper cuts, Goin’ Home is an utterly delicious rocking blues album. Opening with “Palace of the King” with New Orleans’s The Rebirth Brass Band, Mr. Shepherd and companions let loose from the get-go before moving into the slickly smooth “Everything Gonna Be Alright.”
Listeners get a dose of harmonica on “I Love the Life I Live” with guest artist Kim Wilson. Goin’ Home just gets better with organ infused coolness that is “Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” with guest bluesman Warren Haynes, the syrup slow blues number “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now,” the gospel fired “You Can’t Judges a Book by the Cover” with Pastor Brady Blade, Sr. and the “Cut You Loose” with Ringo Starr.
“Born Under a Bad Sign” with The Rebirth Brass Band is simply not to be missed, as is smoking hot closing track “Still a Fool” with guest artist Robert Randolph.
Working over these blues tracks with a savage coolness, Mr. Shepherd’s guitar work proves potent and is just this side of civilized. Goin’ Home digs deep, unearthing that underbelly of wildness of the blues so that you can’t turn away. And, who would want to?
Buy Goin’ Home
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
