John Hammond in the Projo

In case you missed it, I've grabbed a piece of the John Hammond interview published in a recent Providence Journal. John returns to the Narrows this Saturday. Tickets are getting scarce last I heard. So make your move if you want to go to the show.

He keeps preachin' the blues
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 13, 2005
BY WALTER TUNISKnight Ridder Newspapers

What is the least obvious environment for creating deliciously tortured and often devilish blues music?

For John Hammond, the answer is easy -- church.

The pioneering singer-guitarist, who performs Saturday at Fall River's Narrows Center for the Performing Arts, has been responsible for some serious soul-stirring blues testimony during the past 40 years. Just get a load of the jubilation that erupts out of Son House's "Preachin' Blues," a longtime staple of Hammond's concert performances. The tune underscores the acoustic intensity that has long defined his lean, devout blues sound, and it rejoices in salvation even though Hammond sings as if the devil were just a few steps behind him.

But it took a small gothic-style church in the heart of the Midwest for Hammond to summon the swampy grooves and often dark blues grinds in his new album, In Your Arms Again.

"We went out to this old church in Salina, Kan., that's been used as a kind of recording studio and concert hall," Hammond said by phone recently from his home in Jersey City, N.J. "Every October, they have a blues festival there and bring in some of the greats from the old days -- people like Pinetop Perkins and Robert Lockwood. I was invited there, as well. The sound in this room was just amazing.

"Then the owner approached us and said, 'Any time you want to make a record here, we'll make it worth your while.' We took him up on it."

So Hammond; his wife and co-producer, Marla; bassist Marty Ballou; drummer Stephen Hodges; and engineer Oz Fritz set up shop in the church -- renamed Blue Heaven Studio -- to record the kind of music you probably won't hear at choir practice.

Typifying the album's often stormy mood are chestnuts by a trio of blues giants: Willie Dixon's "Evil (Is Going On)," Howlin' Wolf's "Moanin' for My Baby" and John Lee Hooker's "Serve Me Right to Suffer." From Hammond's guitar attack to his emotive vocal command, the songs bridge the decades. They blend the immediacy of the solo country blues recordings Hammond cut in the early '60s for the Vanguard label with the thick but flexible band groove that drove his sublime 2001 album of Tom Waits tunes, Wicked Grin.

Submitted by Steve the Emcee, who's got the blues bigtime these days.