Real Gone - talking the Blues
She’s cute, she can play guitar, she’s got a voice like Sheryl Crow, and she channels Stevie Ray Vaughan. What’s not to like? So this is the Ally Venable Band with the title track of her 2023 album, Real Gone.
I’ve always been in the Blues/Rock camp, ever since I was a young teen (c. 1965). It drove me to save up for my first guitar: £15 with a generous subsidy from my father.
In the sixties, Blues for me was not scratchy acoustic songs from the impoverished black balladeers of the Delta; it was the reinvention of the genre in the hands of Clapton, Page and Hendrix; the power of the sixties counterculture.
Today, fifty years later, Joe Bonamassa may be every bit as technically fluent as the old masters, but Blues in the 2020s is adrift. Rooted neither in hardship nor in rebellion, the modern blues has turned inward: angst about 'preserving the tradition' and 'purity'.
I sometimes listen to new bands like the Zac Schulze Gang.
I’m super-impressed by the energy, the technical and performing skill. But apart from the classic covers (video) most of the new songs are not up to much - they feel disconnected from the zeitgeist.
What would it look like, a Blues which authentically expressed the angst and aspirations of today? Beth Hart, a woman of the demi-monde, comes to mind, and the blue-collar desperation of Walter Trout; the authentic, personal expression of long, hard lives lived at the sharp end.
But as a channel for the disaffected youth?
Not yet.
