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"Johnny Shines & Snooky Pryor" (Blind Pig, 1991)

 

  

"In 1991, Johnny recorded Back To The Country with Snooky Pryor, Johnny's first new recording in ten years. In the early 1950's, Johnny and Snooky recorded sides for the J.O.B. label that helped lay the ground work for Chicago's electrified, small band blues. Reunited four decades later in the Texas hill country, they took the opposite tack with a set of acoustic, country blues that returned them to their roots in the Mississippi delta. Robert Johnson, the proud, tormented genius of Delta blues, is the spirit hovering over Back To The Country. PIn the forty years since Johnny and Snooky first recorded together, blues has undergone unlikely transformations, growing first into white popular music, then disappearing almost entirely, before being revived several times. Back To The Country remains as close as you're likely to get to the source the Delta, one more time.

Review

By no means are Shines and Pryor dotards looking back with teary eyes. The blues' emotional dualities-sadness leavened with humor, warmth caught up in despair, pride alongside disquiet-are keenly reflected by fifteen country blues the two recorded earlier this decade. Granted their facility isn't what it once was, yet Shines the singer and Pryor the harp player/vocalist, J.O.B. labelmates forty years ago in Chicago, still employ tonal modulations, phrasing, and space with special knowledge-and no one has interpreted Robert Johnson songs as knowingly as Mr. Shines (four examples here). That's John Nicholas and Kent Du Shane ably filling in for poststroke. Shines on guitar." - © Frank John Hadley 1993 --From Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD