Kelly Joe Phelps taps the Delta Muse once again
Perhaps because of the frequent inclement weather, dust from the Mississippi Delta has been swept across the country. Seattle-based Kelly Joe Phelps must have inhaled some of this dust somewhere along the line, because it has coated his vocal chords and seemingly his soul with a layer of melancholy and smoke that sounds more at home outside a share-cropper’s hovel than it does by the nearest Starbucks.
Phelps began his career as a free-jazz bass player, but sometime in his mid-twenties, he discovered the music of misery-masters such as Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt. He found his own voice, a voice steeped in Jacksonian back-alley pain and vagabond glory.
Critical acclaim came to Phelps during his early career because of his virtuosic mastery of lap-slide guitar. Albums such as Roll the Stone Away and Shine Eyed Mister Zen remind up-and-coming guitar slingers that they are not nearly as good as they imagine themselves, and Phelps audience include such guitarists as U2s Edge, who must sit slack-jawed as they hear the ease with which KJP weaves improvisational melodies around his already progressive chord structures.
Lately, Phelps has laid aside the steel slide that has served him for so many years, and he has begun to focus his career on songwriting. His latest album Tunesmith Retrofit follows this Muse, and although guitarists probably will be a bit disappointed in Phelps straightforward guitar arrangements and lack of pyrotechnic improvisation, this album contains some of KJPs most mature and sophisticated songs (lyrically and musically).
Phelps songs on Tunesmith allow him to play the role of both storyteller and eulogist. He opens the album with Crow’s Nest, a lovely and loose four-verse ballad that tells the story of two young lovers’ play down by the riverside.
I know of another place beneath some overgrown vine
I can cut them back and help you down
There I’ll listen to every song you know
And clap when you are through
Maybe then I will kiss you
The melody and intricacy of “Spanish Hands� help the listener fall in the love with the girl of the piece while infusing him with both the pain and glory of loss and love. Phelps expresses his own personal loss in the song “Handful of Arrows� (written about the late Chris Whitley) by entreating his dead colleague to “Play again, oh/ Tap on the board/ I could use a song here, now/ Word Unheard, None ever burned/ A room to set me in.�
Tunesmith does contain some interesting surprises, one of which being KJPs use of the banjo for two tunes. Apparently, he experimented with the banjo early in his career, but it has taken him a decade to record with one. Guitarists looking for old-style Phelps thrills will not be disappointed with “Skapegoat�, an impossibly fast banjo tune that demostrates that this fret master has not lain aside his sophisticated chops because he had to.
All in all, the album still leaves the listener haunted by ghosts of passion and rootsy guts borne out of the pain of Delta blues, but Phelps is not content to rest on his laurels and simply do what made him famous. Instead, he continues to surprise us, and with Tunesmith Retrofit he rides the Delta Muse like Pecos Bill rides the Cyclone.
