Blues Bytes

Live In The Queen's Lounge With Eric Bibb

Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise

Somewhere Off The Coast of Mexico

Photo by Joe Rosen www.josepharosen.com

Eric Bibb lives up to the promise of the term "legendary" in the title Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise. Truly a legend in the making, Bibb is his proud daddy's son. His father, Leon Bibb, today is described as a Folk and musical theatre singer and TV personality. In his time, however, Leon was vilified by the musical press. "Serious" critics criticized Leon during "the Folk scare" for being too polished and theatrical for a genre that at the time was building on the music of the "people" with people meaning mostly rural uneducated practitioners of Appalachian, Delta, and Dust Bowl homespun songs.

"Everybody wanted the next Leadbelly," says son Eric. "What makes a sharecropper more authentic than a southern young man who aspires to be a Broadway musical theatre artist? What makes one artificial and the other one real?"

Like his father, Eric is a polished singer, but in a world that now accepts African-American singers that have a studied delivery and sing about timeless topics that have nothing to do with sharecropping. Meticulously dressed in slacks, jacket, plain T-shirt, and his patented flat-brim hat, this 51-year-old man with skin that looks like caramel-colored porcelain, who looks like a thin Harry Belafonte, sings in an operatically clean and perfect voice. At one point in his second set on the ship he stood up and humorously referred to getting into his Elvis mode. Actually, his voice is as distinctive as Elvis´ on his own material, and Bibb can also emote and project on songs by Rev. Gary Davis and Son House with an intensity that rivals the originals.

Bibb sells each song with an anecdotal introduction that sets the stage and often ties in with his immediate audience to make the listener feel like they're part of this total experience and that this performance is a unique and special concert. He introduced "Diamond Days," the title song from his most recent album, by admitting the comparison between playing in Kansas and a Blues cruise came as a result of trying to find a word to rhyme with Topeka. The line in the song is "On a Wednesday, I was playin` in a biker bar outside Topeka/On that Friday,

Photo by Joe Rosen www.josepharosen.com

I was playin` on a Blues cruise goin´ to Dominica." Both his introductions and his songs reflect his extremely well read background, but connect on a heart to heart basis and never become weighted or academic. He admits he borrowed the line "Eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" on the song "Heading Home" from Ghandi. The line "Love is real/Fear is just a dream," he says came to him after reading a book called The Gift of Change by Marianne Williamson.

Like Dylan, Bibb has an uncanny ability to turn his learned and informed perspective on the world into common man homilies with universal appeal. Never forcedly academic, his timeless songs are in the best tradition of his mentors who include Son House, Rev. Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotton, Josh White, and his own father.

Eric Bibb's latest release is the live recording An Evening With Eric Bibb on MC Records.

Don Wilcock is a contributing editor at BluesWax. You may contact Don at blueswax@visnat.com.

http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/blueswax/feature.cfm

Kelly Johanns-DiCillo Tour Publicist

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