Z.Z. Hill IN MEMORIUM - Down Home Blues

Down Home Blues · Z.Z. Hill
In Memorium (1935-1984)
℗ 1985 Malaco Records, Inc
Released on: 1985-05-30
Contributor: George Jackson

Down Home Blues, Z.Z. Hill’s 1981–82 breakthrough smash on Malaco, hit the blues and soul music worlds like a revelation. Suddenly, in a musical marketplace dominated by post-disco mechanized pounding and the growing influence of rap and hip-hop, here was a singer whose voice sounded equal parts gravel and swamp muck. Down Home Blues delivers Hill’s dispatch from a late-night party at which his lady, slipping off her shoes and sipping a cocktail, exhorted him to “take off those fast records, and let me hear some down-home blues,” while a fatback guitar chords and snakes through the mix, a fallen-angel gospel choir adds inspirational spice, and an easy-rolling blues shuffle pushes everything along with a swaggering, sensual lope.

Hill was already a seasoned veteran by then, but he was not yet familiar to the most mainstream soul and blues lovers. That was about to change. If Down Home Blues (penned by ace Malaco tunesmith George Jackson) didn’t single-handedly ignite the modern-day blues (or soul blues) revival, it was almost certainly the main driver. It catapulted Hill into national and international recognition, and it paved the way for Malaco to become the decade’s leading purveyor of modern blues and southern soul. Suddenly, in youth-obsessed America, singers in their 30s and older were hitting the airwaves and the jukeboxes with music that sounded, for the most part, as if it could have been made any time over the previous 20 or 25 years. They were selling records and packing houses, drawing multi-generational crowds and pushing those crowds to heights of ecstasy and emotional commitment that seemed to fly defiantly in the face of postmodernist ironic detachment. When Little Milton proclaimed that “the blues is alright . . . it’s here to stay” in 1982 (and then again in 1984 on Playing for Keeps, his Malaco debut), what might have sounded like whistling in the dark just a few years earlier now resonated like a proclamation of victory.

[sigmatricky]

I listen to this everyday.... Man, this is an awesome jam...