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