The Reverend Peyton and Too Slim Make White Blues Matter

Maybe it just means I’m turning into an old grump, but 2008 will go down in history as the first year in memory that I actually wound up liking two albums by bands of white people that hit Billboard’s blues chart. First there was Too Slim and the Tail Draggers, from Seattle. Then there was The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, from Indiana. Both are trios, both spend a lot of time on the road, both play guitar better than they sing, both record for small labels, both I never heard of before this year, and both like to eat.

The Tail Draggers’ The Fortune Teller as often as not chugs at the heels of ZZ Top (“Just Got Paid” in the title track, “Sharp Dressed Man” in “She Gives Me Money”), though the Billy Gibbons-like mumbling in “Ain’t It Lonesome” lands between guitar chords that sound more like the Guess Who’s “American Woman,” and though my favorite track might rather be the obsessively funky talk-rhymer “Cowboy Boot,” the guitars of which actually seem more Skynyrd-like. Mellower moments melodically recall the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek” (“Mexico”) and Neil Young (“Givers and Takers”), while lyrics deal with such time-tested topics as turning middle-aged with nothing to show, moving to Mexico, and dealing with black magic voodoo women who give cash away and liken the singer’s private parts to parts of an automobile. My only complaint is that I wish the vocals were up front; Too Slim comes off a little too stoned sometimes. That wasn’t so much of a problem, interestingly, on the trio’s possibly preferable earlier Tales of Sin & Redemption, which had just as much ZZ (awesome Rio Grand Mud dance boogie in “Brown Bottle Rock,” bawdy references to “wood” in “Oven Burnin’ Woman,” “Tush” riff in the backdoor-man-themed “Flatblack Flathead”) and more bumpity-bump rhyme-talking over Skynyrd guitars (“Walk on Water,” featuring Montgomery Gentry-style sage advice from the singer’s old man), but also some soul-metal worthy of Thin Lizzy (“Soul Perspective”) and lots of badass fonky stuff. My advice: buy both albums, and while you’re at it, stock your pantry with a generous supply of Too-Slim-owned Essie's South American Style Sauce.

Where the Taildraggers’ website links to beef stroganoff recipes, the CD booklet inside The Whole Fam Damnily by the Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band has a recipe for persimmon pudding on the back. “Persimmon Song” is one of the album’s speedier but also more vocally perfunctory songs; so is “Mama’s Fried Potatoes” – the Reverend definitely has his one-note rubber-baby-buggy-bumper tendencies. But he sure can play, and his wife Breezy strums a mean washboard, and I like when the Rev.’s higher vocal pitch shoots for Charley Patton (in “John Hughes”) or Charlie Poole (in “Them Old Days Are Gone.”) Even better, the running-out-of-money theme running through “Wal-Mart Killed the Country Store,” “Why Is Everybody Getting Paid But Me,” “Worn Out Shoe” (melodically based on that Reagan-era recession anthem “Born in the U.S.A.”) and “Can’t Pay the Bill” (partly about not being able to afford medical insurance!) clearly make this record a viable soundtrack for the economy crashing on dead-end streets way beyond Main.

So, while Too Slim and the Taildraggers certainly deserve to be embraced as the waffle-stomping ‘70s-style blooze-hammer bar dogs they are, the Peyton clan’s update of the sort of white blues-country hokum you’d find on, say, Yazoo Records’ soon-to-be-indispensable Hard Times Come Again No More: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships: Classic Recordings From the 1920s and 30s just might make him more in tune with the 2008 we’re living in. Somebody elect these folks to Congress, now.