CD Review
Joe Louis Walker
She's My Money Maker
JSP Records (© 2003, #2157)
by Jim Angehr
Review date: August 2004
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"Keeping the Blues Alive Award" Achievement for Blues on the Internet Presented by The Blues Foundation
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Joe Louis Walker stands at the forefront of the ranks of contemporary blues musicians as one of the most consistently engaging performers, and his string of four albums in a year (on three different labels), from early 2002 to 2003, signals that he is not slowing down anytime soon. She's My Money Maker, the fourth of this sequence, is similar to last year's Guitar Brothers in that both evoke the classic, Chicago blues sound. Unlike Guitar Brothers, however, She's My Money Maker features Walker exclusively on slide guitar for the first time .
Overall, the results of this slide guitar excursion are successful. In other, less restrained hands, a "slide guitar album" could simply translate into a sonic bombast of slide meltdown. Not so with Walker—in the ten tracks on the album, he shows himself to be a tasteful slide player who does not sacrifice dynamics and rhythm to pyrotechnics. From the greasy tone of "Slow Down GTO," the record's romp of an opener, to the funk of "Ghetto Life," it's clear that Walker can play slide with the best of them. Two guitar highlights are the glistening "Poor Man Blues," in which the ghost of Muddy Waters rattles around (compare Walker's work here to the stinging, single-string slides of Muddy on LaserLight's live Hoochie Coochie Man), and the like-butter purity of the fretwork on "Hooker's Blues," an homage to Hookers John Lee and especially Earl.
Walker is to be commended for the songwriting on She's My Money Maker; only one of the ten cuts is a cover, a relative rarity in the blues world today. Besides the Gravenites classic, "Born in Chicago," which wisely forgoes an attempt to match the punch of the original Butterfield Band version in favor of a lighter touch, Walker wrote or co-wrote all the other tracks, ostensibly with the slide guitar in mind. Plus, in keeping with the rest of Walker's albums, the songs' subjects range well beyond done-me-wrong cliches and explore issues like the urban poor ("Ghetto Life," "Poor Man Blues") and even the sweet hereafter ("My Judgement Day").
On the downside, the album's singular focus upon slide guitar is also its primary weakness: too many of these songs sound the same. The stripped-down "My Judgment Day" and "Eight Years of Loving" stand out not only because they are great songs, but since the rest of the tracks deviate too little from the slide guitar, bass, and drums format. She's My Money Maker is more or less a one-dish meal. The stellar organ and piano work by Geno Blackwell could have been used more often to spell the verse-then-guitar pattern of the songs here. Even better, if Walker was going for a vintage Chicago vibe, no ‘50's Chicago band would have been complete without harp or horns—why not have added them here? (Only "Eight Years of Lovin'" has harmonica, played by Walker himself with tasty high-end licks that would make Kenny Neal proud.) The lack of musical variety on the disc, even if it was intended as a slide guitar-heavy piece, makes She's My Money Maker sound more like an exercise than a fully realized and well-rounded album. At the same time, Walker's standout musicianship makes this exercise an ultimately satisfying one.
www.jsprecords.com
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