One Kind Favor

All of God's children should pick up the new B.B. King album, "One Kind Favor." At 83, we should all be so lucky as to shuffle out the door and fetch the paper, let alone crank out 15 tracks as good as these.

Back in 2005, when King released "B.B. King and Friends: 80," I was a little worried that he was going to go the way of Carlos Santana, selling out in his old age with a string of formulaic pop collaboration albums. Shame on me for doubting the musical integrity of Riley B. King.

T-Bone Burnett worked the production magic on this one,  and the band includes Dr. John on piano and Nathan East on bass; it would have been hard to make a bad record with such a crew. The songs were penned by a who's who of blues legends - T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson, and John Lee Hooker, to name a few. This is the first album in a while that recaptures King's classic sound from the 1950s and 60s, and it does so without sounding tired or derivative, no small feat in a genre in which the 3-chord musical template is fairly immutable.

King is equal parts guitarist and vocalist, and both are in prime form on "One Kind Favor." Nobody can shout the blues the same way, and although his guitar playing has lost some of its forcefulness and precision in recent years, absolutely nobody before or since (except maybe Miles Davis) can phrase a note like B.B. King.

There isn't a bad song on this album.  The highlights include "See that my Grave is Kept Clean," "Get these Blues off Me," and "Backwater Blues." The last tune, a Bessie Smith slow-burner about being flooded out of one's home (penned in the 1920s), is my personal favorite. B.B. King isn't given to making political statements with his music, and flooding is a pretty common theme among blues songwriters. That said, the closing verse of the tune could have been the soundtrack in August/September 2005, and I can't imagine the fact was lost on Mr. King, himself Mississippi-born:

"When it's thunderin' and lightning, and the rain begin to pour,

When it's thunderin' and lighting, and the wind begin to blow,

There are so many poor people, that didn't have no place to go."

Peace.