Review Summary: Perhaps the essential debut Blues album of the 60s
The 60s revival had plenty of the old Delta Blues singers eating good, often for the first time in their lives as they began playing not only to packed auditoriums and enthusiastic crowds, but to White audiences, audiences with money and connections to the music industry, audiences who could record, package and mass-produce their material and get it out to thousands, if not millions hungry for a new sound. It only made sense that the marriage of organic folk and a mass audience should result in some progeny, inspiring a whole new generation of artists of every stripe; that Blues would finally get its due as a universal cultural force was due in no small part to this following generation of musicians working to make sure this cornerstone of Black culture would find its renewed life in every corner of the country.
Small wonder too, that Taj Mahal’s 1968 debut should, as much as possible, draw from the basic approach of his forebears, eschewing all the psychedelic frill and fringe in favor of a lean, hard-stomping sound that touches so lightly on hard-rock and soul tones and rhythms that they feel like less of an outside influence and more like the natural extension of Taj Mahal himself. Henry (aka Taj) intended at first to make farming his vocation, and by his own account it’s a vocation he was more than suited for. It’s a job with very little room for sentimentality, for frippery or frivolous experimentation, but rather one that demands focus, sweat and a hard kind of rationality. And while Taj is singing with that smoky-gold voice about all the travails and vicissitudes of life, his delivery has so little in the way of empty sentiment, his theatricality is so tightly reined in that it takes a firm back seat to simply being the
hardest Blues sound there could be.
The album itself is about as pure a joy as a Blues album can be. Taj’s voice is like honeyed smoke, his harmonica a triple-distilled shot of wailing klaxon blues, the guitars and drums like a sturdy framework of rough-hewn oak. There’s not a moment wasted, not a question in the mind as to whether things might have been done a bit differently, whether a song really needed to be in that part of the sequence, whether the whole thing works as a perfect package. It’s lean, gritty, 32 minutes of Taj wailing what is the essential perfect Blues, whether with his God-given pipes or those of the harmonica, anchored by the inimitable genius of Ry Cooder on rhythm guitar and mandolin (check that mandolin on Walkin’ Blues). The production is a well-oiled vehicle for all the work Taj and company are putting in, all the guts and sawdust sound of smoky pool halls and neon-lit dive bars resonating through the air.
And while Taj might not quite touch the absolute rawness of some of those early Delta singers, there are few, if any, of the new generation of the 60s who were more in-tune with the whole Blues spirit. The real surprise is that Taj Mahal should have
two damn-near perfect albums in the span of only a year, and if his debut has received the lion’s share of the acclaim, it’s only because it came first. With this one-two salvo, Taj Mahal stamped into the earth the proclamation that the life of the Blues was going to extend so far past the experiments and trends of the psych-era, that the possibilities for the music opened up by the commercial opportunities of the folk revival would hold open the possibility of a Blues sound that was no less pure and vital than it had been in the roadhouses of the Delta, but which could speak the same language to a new generation.
