For those unaware, three of today’s deepest, most decorated acoustic blues masters reunite to summon ancestral spirits with songs both long remembered and newly created.

Even as they step back in time, Guy Davis, Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart - who met at the 1996 Chicago Blues Festival and won ardent acclaim for their first True Blues project in 2013 - prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that African American blues remains as vital and vibrant as ever.

Recorded separately in Virginia, Mississippi and New York, these soul-stirring performances include a Jimmy Strother banjo song migrated to Piedmont-style guitar (Harris’s Fight On), an inspired reworking of Elizabeth Cotten’s Shake Sugaree, reimagined as if Blind Willie McTell were playing the guitar (Davis’s Everything I Got Is Done In Pawn), and the first Charley Patton song that Hart ever learned, Screamin’ and Hollerin’.

Even the original compositions here are steeped in history, albeit personal history. Harris wrote What’s That I Smell? with his time spent in New Orleans in mind - specifically, his nights playing in a joint called The Funky Butt.

Davis laments the necessity of a life on the road, away from family, in the disarmingly confessional See Me When You Can. And Hart drew inspiration from another great bluesman, his friend Henry Townsend (who died in 2006 at the age of 96), to write If the Blues Was Money, which he performs here on a Sears Silvertone-branded 1950s Kay flat-top guitar.

1. We Are Almost Down to the Shore (Fight On)
2. Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues
3. See Me When You Can
4. What’s That I Smell
5. If the Blues Was Money
6. Deep Sea Diver
7. I Belong to the Band
8. Highway 61
9. Everything I Got is Done in Pawn

This brilliantly immersive new set opens on the ambiently smooth We Are Almost Down to the Shore (Fight On), the emotive Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues and the forthright See Me When You Can, and then we are gifted the informed What’s That I Smell, the Telecaster-driven If the Blues Was Money, before the rampant Deep Sea Diver, the impassioned I Belong to the Band, the music rounding out on the emboldened Highway 61, coming to a close on the informatively affecting Everything I Got is Done in Pawn.

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