CD Review Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors – Black Country Boy

Doc Bowling (guitar & vocals), Donnie Burke (guitar, baritone guitar, banjo & backing vocals), Simon Minney (bass, acoustic bass, whistle & backing vocals), Graham Hadley (drums & backing vocals), Roger Champion (percussion & backing vocals), Sophie Loyer (violin), Lawrence Davies (harmonica) & Eddie Kulak (keyboards)

(Review by Russell)

A new name to your reviewer, Doc Bowling is a new favourite. Doc and his fellow seven ‘blues professors’ can be pigeon-holed quite easily – providing you have a vacant dozen or more pigeon holes! Alt country, blues (twelve bar and its variants), Americana, rock-a-billy, shuffling bottleneck, ska – all from an oblique (psychotherapist’s) view point and a Stetson brim-full of humour and understated musical excellence.

Doc Bowling sings on all eleven tracks on Black Country Boy. The eponymous first track identifies Doc Bowling as a lad raised in the West Midlands:

Smethwick Town to Langley Green 

Rowley Regis!

Old Hill to Cradley Heath

From Lye down

To Stourbridge Town

The remarkably prescient Fal$e Prophit Blues is right on the money:

Draw a picture of the Prophet,

You’re shot dead on sight

A politically aware band making a statement! It’s a change from the current vogue for bands making a quasi-intellectual pitch for their brand of ‘original composition.’  The musicianship isn’t in any way secondary to the lyric content; Eddie Kulak (keys) and Lawrence Davies (harmonica) feature. Existential Blues is heavy stuff. Don’t worry, read the liner-notes…A guitar and harmonica-driven up-tempo twelve-bar blues. That’ll do.

Pedestrian Crossroad Blues borrows from Robert Johnson. Slide guitar from Donnie Burke and fiddle from Sophie Loyer despairing of ‘the deadly and deplorable state of England’s pedestrian crossings’ is unabashed blues with lyrics not of 1930s America, but of twenty first century concerns:

You say you’ve got road rage

What we need is road peace!

These vehicular road-wars,

They’ve just gotta cease

The spitting out of Ve-hic-u-lar has to be heard. Almost as good as the classic I was born in 19 and 42 (wailing Chicago harp ‘n’ all).

Biodiesel Blues poses the question:

Must the poor go hungry

Just so the rich can drive?

Growing corn for diesel

Will the earth survive?!

The CD cover image Pastorale (detail) is by Claire Spencer courtesy Bridgeman Images.

One could be tempted to vote for a Green candidate at the forthcoming General Election!

Back to the music – and it is about the music – Church Going Blues, great lyrics:

My man Muddy Waters

He brought me the news

You gotta go to choich

If you want to sing the blues

A lyric with choich in it makes Black Country Blues a ‘must have’ purchase.

Black Country Boy by Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors is available now. The band’s CD launch is on Friday 20 March at King’s College London Students’ Union.  
Russell