Various Artists Bar Room Blues A 12-Track Program
Released: January 27 2004 Origination Year: 2004 Time: 48:24 Tracks: 12 Produced by: Various Style: Studio Format: CD Enhancement: None Website:

Telarc's Blues series celebrates current blues musicians with definite styles. With quite a roster of recording artists, Telarc can reach deep into a well of talented bluesmen and produce playable quality albums. With Bar Room Blues, they cull the most representative songs from albums they have released in the past. This 12-track program finds a wide assortment of good songs and a few great ones.

The title grants you entrance into the Blues Bar as it opens the stage to a collection of varied blues tunes. From funky to rock, from jazzed-up blues to Delta styled blues, Bar Room Blues lays it out for you to pick your favorite style. As a sampler, this album can be a primer to the various styles that is being played today. Additionally, it can serve to introduce you to quality blues and who's playing them. This collection of songs carries a theme of drowning in alcohol that is coupled by the title and the tongue-in-cheek phrase, A 12-track program. I personally didn't see the need to make the correlation because, as a sampler, it is pretty good. But it won't make you seek out AA counseling after listening. What it will do is to have you scrambling to pick up an album or two from some of the talent contained on this album.

The album begins with "Rip This Joint", an extract from the previously released cover set of The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street called Exile on Blues Street. That album held a handful of current blues musicians performing their renditions of songs from the revered classic, some with great effect. One of those songs, the spirited "Rip This Joint" as done by Tommy Castro, a San Francisco based band is quality that doesn't skimp on heat. Firebrand guitar and saxophone give this song a great workout, allowing it to let its hair down a little.

Tab Benoit's version of "I Got Loaded" is a rollicking song from the South that sounds as gin-drenched as its lyrics would have you to believe. Musselwhite's harmonica and vocals do a classy version of Ivory Joe Hunter's "Cold Grey Light of Dawn".

Of the surprises on this album are two very noticeable guitar oriented songs. The first is from Kenny Neal with his own, "Whiskey Tears" and again as he joins Tab Benoit and Debbie Davies in "Night Life". Both songs showcase a guitar lead that is at once a damn good Eric Clapton style. Kenny Neal is so good that this album should push you to seek out the albums that his songs originate from just to hear how good he actually is. The Kenny Jones inclusion here, "Whiskey Tears" sounds 70s style blues rock and is a gracious 5 minutes long.

A song from the 1998 covers album, The Songs of Willie Dixon, that celebrates Willie Dixon songs, is an excellent tune. "If the Sea Was Whiskey" is a near perfect bar-room recitation of the foot tapping original. And the diamond of this set, the perfect "Feelin' No Pain" by Tinsley Ellis, is a rich Blues/Rock nugget that brings to mind classic blues/rock bands of the 70s, in this case, displays a kinship with Robin Trower. The song is an Ellis original and comes from the 2002 Telarc issue of his Hell or High Water album. Like Stevie Ray Vaughn before him, if he had come out in the mid 70s, he may have been big.

12 tracks, a multiplex of styles, and all the blues you can drink out of a whiskey bottle in a single disc sampler. From the best that modern blues has to offer to the best that the Telarc Blues Series has to offer, song for song, this multi directional sampler platter is just the thing to put on and footstomp around your listening room to.

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