CHAMPION JACK DUPREE: BACK HOME IN NEW ORLEANS (1990)
1) When I'm Drinkin'; 2)
Lonesome Bedroom; 3) I Don't Know; 4) Calcutta Blues; 5) Freedom; 6) My Woman
Left Me; 7) Broken Hearted; 8) Way Down; 9) The Blind Man; 10) No Future.
The title says it all. After thirty years of
living all over the place in Europe, now aged something like 80 (because nobody
knows his birthday properly), Champion Jack Dupree finally finds himself back
in his hometown — for a brief while, for sure, but well enough to make his way
to the nearest recording studio and lay down a bunch of tracks that would serve
as the basis for his last albums. Exactly what he had been doing in between
1977 and 1990 is hard to ascertain: discographies for that period are just as
messy and conflicting as for the earlier years, usually mixing together
re-releases of old material, part-time collaborations with other artists, and
genuinely new stuff — although for Dupree, «genuinely new» usually means just
another take on something from about 1940, with new session players and more
modern production techniques. In any case, whatever he did produce in the Eighties is fairly hard to get these days, and
only the most rabid of completists should probably bother getting it.
These records from the early 1990s, though,
having been released on the Bullseye Blues label (run by keyboardist and
producer Ron Levy), have the distinction of being American and, thus, somewhat
easier to locate. Most of the musicians backing Dupree on this one are
Louisiana natives, except for guitar player Kenn Lending — this guy comes from
Denmark, yet another blues aficionado who'd struck a friendship with the Champ
sometime in the early Eighties, back when his own Kenn Lending Blues Band was
hailed as «the hardest working blues band in Denmark». Like most of Dupree's
collaborators, Lending sounds like a respectable bluesman, but one that is
completely derivative of B. B. King and Eric Clapton, and therefore, just
another humble sideman for Dupree.
The album is a big band affair, with plenty of
brass overdubs, but the only outstanding thing about it depends on the context
— I would be hard pressed to name another blues album from 1990 that would be
recorded by a genuine pre-war artist
with that much verve: Dupree's vocals sound completely unaffected by time, and
although they have never been particularly special, the age of 80 is precisely
that moment where the «nothing special-ness» has a good chance of being
converted to greatness, as the record becomes an arrogantly time-defying moment
in history. At this point, he can re-write and re-record his (or other
people's) material all he wants, anything
will sound awesome as long as he still hits those keys with full force and belts
out those blues clichés with the voice of... well, with the voice of a grizzled
old black man, but now that he's eighty and all, this voice serves him better
than ever.
Commenting on individual tracks is pointless:
by this time, we are expected to almost precisely guess the ratio of lush blues
ballads to straightahead 12-bar blues to jump blues and rockabilly numbers on a
CJD record, and apart from that, the album features no specific diary-style
surprises: perhaps the very pleasure of recording in his homeland again
automatically limited Dupree to the most basic styles of self-repetition. From
the opening dance-blues chords of ʽWhen I'm Drinkin'ʼ to the closing slow blues
of ʽNo Futureʼ, Back Home In New Orleans
is one big party where even the sorrowful numbers surreptitiously ring with
joy, and the best I can do is acknowledge that this happy feel exuded by the
old man ends up being infectious. Above and beyond everything else, Champion
Jack Dupree is a smiling survivor — and this is why it is so important for us
to have this album from him, even if it does not truly deserve more than one
listen.
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