Monthly Archives: March 2021

Big Creek Slim
Twenty-Twenty Blues
Straight Shooter – SHOT 033
All songs by Big Creek Slim

Certainly, 2020 was a year that most of us hope to forget, but never will. Big Creek Slim was in Brazil, “in quarantine in one of the world’s epicenters of coronavirus,” he says, “with all the polemics, boredom, paranoia, loneliness, despair and fading hopes that each and every one of us had to deal with.” His response was the album you hold in your hands, with 13 original songs, performed solo – “my contribution to the worldwide corona blues,” he explains. Big Creek makes an unflinching assessment of what he saw and heard. In “The Goddamn China Blues,” he’s more observational than judgmental, recognizing the loss, hardship, and broken lives in the wake of COVID-19. On the title track, Big Creek cites the killing of George Floyd as the latest in a history of lethal violence and discrimination that white America has perpetrated against the nation’s black population. He connects the Floyd killing to the murder of Emmett Till and the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre in Tulsa, Okla., noting “how things didn’t change that much, and maybe they never will.” The album isn’t all social commentary, however, because a guitar player in quarantine is going to dig in and play some guitar. It features tunes such as “Little Wheel Rag” and “Up in Smoke,” which tap into the ragtime/medicine show legacy of such artists as Blind Boy Fuller and Pink Anderson. These offer a welcome counterweight to the burden of the year that was, because frankly, we’ll need to have something to smile about once these crazy days have passed. 

Bryan Powell

Big Creek Slim
Migration Blues
Straight Shooter – SHOT 032
All songs by Big Creek Slim

Otherworldy. That’s an apt description of the music of Big Creek Slim. Big Creek lives in the 21st century, here with the rest of us, but his country blues is borne of another place and time — specifically, the pre-WWII American Deep South. His musical family tree includes Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, to name a few. That said, Big Creek is his own man. He writes his own songs, including all 14 solo tracks here. He is fluent, absolutely, in the language of this musical genre. His vocals resonate, even in his quietest moments. His fingerstyle guitar arrangements reveal a man who has immersed himself in this music. There’s not a false moment to be found. Hear it, and you will believe. Still, Big Creek is writing and singing in the present tense, tackling modern problems. In such tracks as “Deportation Blues” and “Hard Times,” he airs his frustrations, he says, in “applying for family reunion under the rather hostile Danish government. By doing so, I turned into a second-class citizen in my own country, trying to satisfy the system, the landlord and my wife. No surprise – I didn’t manage none!” Enough to give a man the blues, no doubt.

Bryan Powells