Furry Lewis

Blues Magician (Lucky 7)

Listen to "Furry Lewis Rag"

New to acoustic blues? There's few better starting points than Furry Lewis, a Memphis institution who lost his leg in a 1917 railroad accident and rose to blues-picking prominence in the 1920s, witnessed gutbucket Delta blues metamorphose into urban electric Chicago blues, and then saw Eric Clapton and his Brit cronies paying homage to the Delta originals--and himself, a street sweeper by trade when he wasn't singing stories with his git-ar--deified by Stanley Booth in the wonderful Memphis music tome Rythm [sic] Oil. This CD, the second Lewis recording on Lucky 7, captures him as an old-timer in 1969, in bed, with his prosthetic leg off. There are some lapses here, some wrong notes there, some slurred speech between tunes--and a pretty scary rendition of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." His technique here is uneven, at times ragged, at times tight. At his best, he shows his slide-guitar virtuosity, using the guitar body for percussion and the strings to imitate other instruments: bass, piano, and at one point even a bugle. It's a digital connection to the time when blues dinosaurs roamed the land we could only dream about hearing in person today, a $15 ticket to a personal performance in Furry Lewis' home near the musically historic intersection of Fourth and Beale streets. --Don Fluckinger