The Blues According To Rory Block

Being a household name depends as much on the household as it does the name. Not all reading this will know who Rory Block is, but in the households with fans of the rural blues, slide guitar and innovative women in music, to not know would be criminal. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, Block grew up in Manhattan where her father had Allan Block's Sandal Shop on Positively 4th Street in Greenwich Village.

Block grew up hanging out with musicians like Peter Rowan, John Sebastian and Geoff Muldaur, who frequented her father's sandal shop. At 10 years old, she began playing guitar, recording her debut two years later, backing her father on The Elektra String Band Project. While still a teenager, Block met guitarist Stefan Grossman, who, like her, was in love with the blues. At 15, Block left home, hitting the road in true '60s fashion and traveling through the South, where she learned her blues trade at the feet of Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, her greatest influences, before ending up in Berkeley.

In Berkeley, Block developed her slide guitar technique, using a wrench socket as her slide, just as Little Feat founder Lowell George was to do. Block began serious recording with her debut, Rory Block (RCA Victor, 1975). She would record over 24 albums over the next 30 years, raise a family and live a life of highs and lows captured in her often bracing memoir When A Woman Gets The Blues (Aurora Productions, 2011).

After having documented the rural delta blues of Mississippi and Arkansas throughout her recording career, Block consolidated her position in 2006 with her Rykodisc release, The Lady And Mr. Johnson, an inventive and inspired collection of 13 Robert Johnson compositions. Over the next eight years Block released six recordings in her "Mentor Series" devoted to blues artists she had met personally over her formative years. These included Eddie "Son" House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Rev. Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Bukka White.

In 2018, Block released A Woman's Soul: A Tribute To Bessie Smith (Stony Plain Records) as the beginning of her "Power Women Of The Blues" series. The next releases in this new series, Prove It On Me (Stony Plain Records, 2020) and Ain't Nobody Worried: Celebrating Great Women Of Song (Stony Plain, 2022) differed from the Bessie Smith release by including the music of multiple women musicians rather than a single one. The Lady And Mr. Johnson and A Woman's Soul: A Tribute To Bessie Smith, are stylistically more similar to Block's "Mentor Series" than not and deserve to be included in this consideration of the singer's profoundly realized blues expertise.

Rory Block
The Lady And Mr. Johnson
Rykodisc
2006

"Baby, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone... "

Rory Block's The Lady And Mr. Johnson became a part of a larger body of tributes to the blues singer, beginning with the Peter Green Splinter Group's The Robert Johnson Songbook (Snapper Music, 1998), John Hammond Jr., Jr.'s At the Crossroads: The Blues of Robert Johnson (Vanguard, 2003) and Eric Clapton's Me And Mr. Johnson (Reprise, 2004) and going beyond with the Kingfish's The Robert Johnson Project (Fuego, 2010), Big Head Todd and the Monsters's 100 Years of Robert Johnson (Big Records, 2011), Michael Colton's The Robert John Sessions (Crestwood Music, 2012), The Rusties Blues Band Discovering Robert Johnson (Quimera Records, 2021) and Telarc's Hellhound On My Trail: The Songs Of Robert Johnson(2001) and a litany of other multi-artist tributes. Unlike many of these competing tributes, Block remains close to the bone, performing these songs as performed on the original 1936-37 recordings.

That being said, Block does like to add her own touch. On the opening "Cross Road Blues," Block adds a dirty gospel introduction with choir (her own voice re-dubbed) before playing the familiar slide-propelled opening. Her guitar playing is exacting and vocals gritty and harsh as necessary. Block adds a thin, sinewy slide introduction to "The Last Fair Deal Gone Down" that both stresses the modern sonics of the recording and frames the timeless grit in her vocal delivery. Block chooses "Terraplane Blues" over "Traveling Riverside Blues" to cover Johnson's most sexual songs, which she does with a beautifully salacious wink. The singer makes a tryptic of Johnson's starkest songs, "Come In My Kitchen," "Hellhound On My Trail," and "If I had Possession Over Judgement Day," hinting less of loss and damnation than a glimmer of redemption. Block turns Johnson on his ear while playing him straight.

Key Selection: "Come In My Kitchen."

Rory Block
Blues Walkin' Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House
Stoney Plain
2008

"I'm gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won't have to work,,, "

Son House was an Ur-Mississippi Delta blues artist, an original emerging from the region in the 1920s, who, along with Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Willie Brown, and Mississippi John Hurt gave rise to the genre. These artists influenced everyone playing and recording later, including Robert Johnson. Before the blues and folk revival of the '60s, House recorded three times, nine sides on 28 May 1930 in Grafton, Wisconsin for Paramount, and seven sides on August 1941 at Klack's Store, Lake Cormorant, Mississippi and 12 sides on 17 July 1942 at Robinsonville, Mississippi by the Library of Congress and Fisk University. These recordings established House as a foremost blues patrician figure. Following his rediscovery by Nick Perls, Dick Waterman and Phil Spiro in 1965, House recorded 21 songs 12-14 April 1965 released by Columbia Records. After that time, House was recorded privately, and the results released in several forms. Popular among these later recordings were two made at the 100 Club in London in June and July 1970. These recordings provided Rory Block's material for her Blues Walkin' Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House.

Block met House in the company of guitarist Stefan Grossman in New York City in 1965. Her memories were vivid, particularly of the forceful way House played guitar, more percussively than melodically. Block describes House thusly,

"Robert Johnson is the celestial note wafting from the highest tower. Son House is the boulder upon which the Cathedral was built. He was so stark, so intense, driving and raw, and always slamming, snapping, and torturing the guitar."

Block takes a more refined path to House's music, using her carefully crafted guitar playing to temper House's violent performance tendencies. She keeps House' relentless sense of rhythm while emphasizing the delicacy of the slide guitar (more than House did). Block makes perfect sense of House'y restless guitar work on the 1930 recordings "My Black Mama, Part 1" and "Preachin' The Blues." In the same way she treated Johnson's "Crossroad Blues on The Lady And Mr. Johnson, Block transforms "Dry Spell Blues, Part 2" into a gospel hoedown. Rather than "John The Revelator," Block chose "Grinnin' In Your Face" for the a cappella selection from House's book. The singer immediately fixes the gravity of the song with a guttural slur, focusing on her personal experience with House's. Block strikes the vein of the blues on this recording.

Key Selection: "Dry Spell Blues. Part 2."

Rory Block
Shake 'Em on Down: A Tribute to Mississippi Fred McDowell
Stoney Plain
2011

..."and I do not play no rock n' roll, ya'll. I just play the straight nat'ral blues..."

And so Mississippi Fred McDowell introduced himself on his 1969 Capitol recording I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll. It was four years prior that Rory Block met McDowell while the blues singer was visiting the famous Syracuse University club, The Jabberwocky Cafe. Block immortalizes this meeting in her song "Mississippi Man," following her biographical account of McDowell's life. Block plays in the percussive, harmonically simple North Mississippi hill-country blues. An intense emphasis on rhythm and percussion characterizes this flavor of the delta blues, along with steady, repeating guitar riffs (similar to what John Lee Hooker would take to Detroit from Clarksdale, MS), minimal chord changes, unorthodox structures, and a strong devotion to the "groove." Block puts her stamp on this subgenre as she did on The Lady And Mr. Johnson and Blues Walkin' Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House. Her slide guitar playing is precise with a jagged momentum.

Block performs songs from throughout McDowell's book. She covers McDowell's versions Scrapper Blackwell's "Kokomo Blues" and John Lee Williamson's "Good Morning Little School Girl" with naked pathos and grit. Block takes McDowell's performance of Bukka White's "Shake 'Em On Down" at a fast clip, incorporating her multiplexed voice as a gospel choir, giving the song the humid, ethereal feel of a fast car ride past Como, MS on Highway 55 going south toward Jackson. She does the same with "I Woke Up This Morning" bringing McDowell into the spiritual realm. Most stunning is the Block original "Ancestral Home" employing South African vocals similar to what Paul Simon used on his Graceland (Warner Bros, 1986) recording with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Block closes the recording with McDowell's "Write Me A Few Of Your Lines," a song from the 1960 blues compilation The Blues Roll On (Atlantic). Bonnie Raitt covered this song in 1973. Raitt's slide guitar style, Block says, is the logical end of the stylistic extension from Son House through McDowell. Amen to that.

Key Selection: "Ancestral Home."

Rory Block
I Belong to the Band: A Tribute to Rev. Gary Davis
Stoney Plane
2012

"One of these days about twelve o'clock / This old world's going to reel and rock / I belong to the band, Hallelu..."

If Rory Block occasionally shaded her previous performances considered here with gospel, she goes all-out Holy Ghost on I Belong to the Band: A Tribute to Rev. Gary Davis. The Rev. Reverend Gary Davis is an outlier here, having been born in Laurens, South Carolina, in the heart of the Piedmont Region, rather than the Mississippi Delta. This subgenre of blues differs from the delta style, being characterized by fingerpicking with an alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern able to support syncopation using the treble strings picked with the forefinger. This method can accommodate and translate ragtime and stride piano to the guitar. Block met Davis at his Bronx home in 1964. She went with guitarist Stefan Grossman, who was among several guitarists receiving direct instruction from Davis. While Davis played both secular and religious music, Block concentrated on his spirituals. There are no "Hesitation Blues," "Cocaine Blues," "Sally, Where'd You Get Your Liquor From," or "Candy Man" for Block: only the straight and narrow path.

Block treats us to the best of Gary Davis' religious material. She assaults "Samson & Delilah" with the fervor of the newly converted, singing from every corner of her vocal range, much as Davis often did. This is the way to open an album! The singer brings in the choir early for a spirited "Goin' To Sit Down On The Banks Of The River" preaching to the revival patrons. Block breaks out her slide for "I Belong To The Band" summoning the Holy Spirit with a ragtime breakdown featuring again the choir. Block extrapolates this same recipe to Davis' touchstone, "Pure Religion." Conversational with the lyrics, Block and her socket slide preach the gospel of inclusion and participation as part of the bargain of having this rarefied community. The singer and choir intertwine the blues and the sacred on "Twelve Gates To The City," showcasing why the two are forever joined. Block closes the album with Davis' greatest contribution to all music to come later, "Death Don't Have No Mercy." While this is not Block's best playing style, she makes an argument for her version here to be comparable or superior to similar performances by Jorma Kaukonen and the Grateful Dead.

Key Selection: "I Belong To The Band."

Rory Block
Avalon: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hurt
Stoney Plain
2013

"Let me see this Albert dying / He's my man and he done me wrong..."

While John Smith Hurt ("Mississippi" John Hurt) is often classified as a country blues singer, his song style differs dramatically from other delta blues musicians like Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, and, even Skip James in that he sang to an intricate fingerpicking, syncopated style that has more in common with the Piedmont blues than the Mississippi Delta Blues. Additionally, he was considered more of a "songster," a tradition that both pre-dated and co-existed with blues music. Songsters typically performed a wide variety of folk songs, ballads, dance tunes, reels and minstrel songs, in addition to the occasional blues tune. Hurt's repertoire reflected this. Block met Hurt during the same compressed time in the 1960s when she met Son House, Fred McDowell, and Rev. Gary Davis, all in company with her then boyfriend, Stefan Grossman.

Hurt was born in Teoc, MS, and grew up in Avalon, a locale that looms large in his music and memory, where he sang in his "Avalon Blues," "Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind / Avalon, my hometown." Like in her Gary Davis tribute, Hurt's performance style was not squarely in Block's focus. Yet, she readily makes these songs her own while paying homage to the artist.

While it is apparent that Block has enjoyed recording this series, she took incandescent glee in making her homage to Hurt. One can hear this mirth in every growl, groan, falsetto howl, and chuckle Block sings. She is wholesomely lascivious on Hurt's more bawdy material ("Candy Man"). When addressing a lover as in "Avalon," "Frankie & Albert," and "Make Me A Pallet On The Floor," Block expresses an organic sensuality that understands these old lyrics intimately, the good and bad love stories each. She plays the saucy coquette on "Richland Woman's Blues." In all cases where she, as protagonist, tells a lover goodbye, she does so with a carnally palpable pleasure.

Block's guitar practice is worth mentioning. On most of the songs, the guitarist overlays her superb slide guitar on Hurt's syncopated ragtime picking. She does this gently as on "Avalon" or with great abruptness as on "Louis Collins." She couples the two guitar styles with a now familiar choir she likes to use when easing a slice of religion or South African soul into a song as she did brilliantly on "Pay Day," the most entertaining song on the recording. Rory Block proves herself a supreme interpreter of all blues styles on this recording and that is saying a lot.

Key Selection: "Pay Day."

Rory Block
Hard Luck Child: A Tribute to Skip James
Stoney Plain
2014

"I'd rather be the devil than to be that woman's man..."

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James is the delta blues outlier. He played a flavor of blues that was so unlike his contemporaries, Charlie Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson. James' music has been called "wonderfully strange" and "Weird." Often called the "Bentonia School" of blues playing, after James' south delta home the style is characterized by a shared repertoire of songs, guitar tunings (James used a D minor tuning [DADFAD]) and chord-voicings giving the "School" with a distinctively minor tonality not common to other styles of blues music. Mercurial and enigmatic, nature blessed James with a high, eerie voice, one terrifying as it is tender. James was not the only practitioner of this school of music. Jack Owens was a contemporary influenced by James, who unlike James, made no early recordings, rather recording during the blues revival of the 1960s. Jimmy "Duck" Holmes is a modern player from the Bentonia School who has been recording since the middle '00s when he was not running his famous Blue Front Cafe at 107 W Railroad Ave, Bentonia, MS.

Rory Block met James in the mid-1960, with Stefan Grossman, though she admits in her autobiography, When A Woman Gets The Blues: (Create Space, 2011), she does not recall this meeting. Instead, she remembers visiting James in the hospital in Philadelphia as he was dying of cancer in 1969. The subtitle "Hard Luck Child" emerges from this late image of James to a teenaged Block as much from James' Paramount release of the same. James' music is so unique and idiosyncratic that successful interpretations are rare. Block fares better than most. Unlike her studied and historically relevant playing of Robert Johnson on The Lady And Mr. Johnson, the guitarist straightens out James' often roaming performance style, overlaying it liberally with her own slide guitar. Block does not sound as comfortable here as she does on Avalon: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hurt, but that in no way means she missed any mark. James' music was not full of fun and Block sings it like the serious matter it is.

The prime points of Hard Luck Child are many: "Special Rider Blues" and "Cypress Grove Blues," both from James' 1931 Paramount Sides, provide Block and listeners a warm-up. Block's guitar playing is robust and her singing full-throated. She is in full command of this material as it is filtered through her own experience. On James' masterpieces, "Devil Got My Woman" and "Hard Times Killing Floor Blues" Block is determined and respectful. She hits her stride on "Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader" where she supplies The Holy Spirit through her providing her own choir, as on the previous recordings. Except here, Block is approaching an emotional crescendo through the committed fervor of her performance. "I'm So Glad" is a potent blend of James' manic delivery, Cream's courageous cover, and Block's dedication to the craft. Block is approaching a musical singularity in this series.

Key Selection: "I'm So Glad."

Rory Block
Keepin' Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White
Stoney Plain
2006

"That Frisco Train done stole my jelly roll... "

With the music of Booker T. Washington "Bukka" White, Rory Block finds her optimal comfort zone. Block met the singer during the same period she met the other artist in her "Mentor Series." She remembered only White's potent and robust aura and she translates this memory and method into the three originals and seven White covers on Keepin' Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White. In comparison with the other artists in the Mentor Series, one might ask who Bukka White is. Do you remember the song "Shake 'em On Down" from the Mississippi Fred McDowell tribute? White composed it. After recording a handful of sides for Victor, Vocalian, and Okeh between 1930 and 1937, authorities convicted him of murder and sentenced him to life at Parchman Farm. He was released two years later and returned to recording, expressing his experiences in prison in "Parchman Farm Blues" and "District Attorney Blues" released in 1940.

White was one of the few blues guitarists to use a cross-note tuning in E minor (in the same manner that Skip James used an open D minor tuning—a step down from E minor). But, instead of using James' intricate fingerpicking, White recalls Son House's driving rhythm to propel his songs. It is here that Rory Block reaches the interpretive zenith in her Mentor Series. She is locked into her comfort zone, delivering a relaxed and integrated survey of White's songbook. Before reaching the canon, Block provides the most effective of her original compositions dedicated to the artists. "Bukka's Day" is Block's account of White's professional life full of music, murder, redemption and perseverance. She sings this over a driving riff, harmonically simple, featuring Blocks striking slide guitar. It is her best integrated effort in original composition for the series.

On White's "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues" (White's answer to Mississippi John Hurt's "Avalon Blues") Block continues to draw from White's harmonically spare songs a universe of experience easily shared. Block presents her vocal asides easily with sensuousness and humor. The singer presents her voice multiplexed to the greatest effect on "Panama Limited" singing with conviction and dark humor. Block outdoes herself on "New Frisco Train" singing with all the laconic bawdiness she has been leading up to throughout this series. It is obvious that she is having fun singing this and the other songs of Bukka White. If Rory Block did nothing else, this would cement her solid blues bona fides.

Key Selection: "New Frisco Train."

Rory Block
A Woman's Soul: A Tribute to Bessie Smith
Stoney Plain
2018

"I'm not tryin' to make you feel blue / I'm not satisfied with the way that you do I've got to help you find somebody to / Do your duty!" After her tributes to the blues patricians of the Mentor Series, Rory Block comes firmly into her own when beginning her "Power Women Of The Blues" series with a complete recording dedicated to the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. Everything the singer strives for previously is manifested in A Woman's Soul: A Tribute to Bessie Smith. Block perfects her command of the sweet kiss-off good bye of a dissatisfied lover on the opening "Do Your Duty," before slipping into the deep double entendre of "Kitchen Man" and "Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl." She puts her hands on her hips and preaches the dirty boogie on "Gimme A Pigfoot And A Bottle of Beer" before making an about face on "On Revival Day" singing "Glory, Glory" in the church house. It is a triumph of the spirit.

Block brings innovation to this set by translating the scratching piano and small combo accompaniment divined from 100-year-old shellac 78s to the precisely expressed slide-guitar style most closely aligned with Ry Cooder's work on Jazz (Warner Bros, 1978) and his soundtrack to the The Long Riders (United Artists, 1980). Block's dedication and musicianship frame the music of Bessie Smith well, providing an appropriate coda to these considerations. Let us count ourselves fortunate to have this music.

Key Selection: "Empty Bed Blues."

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