Artist: Little Johnny Kantreed
CD: Acoustic Alley Blues
Home: Nashville, Tennessee
Style: Blues
Quote: "He’s grown up with the sound, he knows the history, and he can
belt them out with the best."
By Jennifer Layton
With the very first track, out of the body of this skinny white man comes
a grizzled, raspy black man’s voice. “Yonder Comes the Blues” is a slurring,
staggering, authentic and whiskey-fueled ode to bad luck with deliberately sloppy
chord changes and plenty of heart and soul. Little Johnny Kantreed doesn’t just
sing the blues – he’s grown up with the sound, he knows the history, and he
can belt them out with the best.
These songs paint dark watercolors and put me right into the frame. Old houses
with decaying front porches. Walking barefoot on torn-up streets, drinking homemade
red wine, seeking fame and fortune. Bad women and even worse decisions. But
Kantreed knows that the purpose of the blues isn’t to wallow in misery. He delivers
many of these songs with a sly, wicked grin, including my personal favorite,
“Relatives.” He claims to be kin to a woman who spends her day smoking in bed
and listening to the police scanner, a cousin who had a shotgun wedding to a
carnie and was divorced by age fifteen, and a grandpa with a belt buckle as
big as a serving tray. He sings that the scary thing for him is that all these
people know where he lives. The scary thing for me is that I believe him.
A special tip of the battered pageboy cap goes to Micol Davis, who adds her
lovely vocals to two of these tracks. She has a Dolly Parton quality that melts
perfectly into this sound.
“I had the blues so bad one time, it put my face in a permanent frown,” Kantreed
sings at one point. Maybe. But there’s too much spirited mischief in these songs
to make me believe that he’s really down for the count.
http://www.littlejohnnykantreed.com
