Homemade and proud
author: John Book, Music For America
Mississippi John Doude is a one-man powerhouse, playing almost all of the instruments on this album, a great testament to what is being known as Americana. All of the songs here are very personal, feeling like pages from Doude's private diary, and whether he plays an acoustic guitar, a slide, a dobro, or drums, he knows how to do all of it with precision.
His stories are bold and he sings them in a manner which feels as if he is singing to you, or perhaps making the listener feel as if they are singing his words, which in turn may become yours. In songs such as "Cornbread Time", "Hangman's Rope", and "Rollin' Like A Freight Train", his voice has a lot of conviction and even when his vocal approach is by-the-book, or it sounds as if he's trying to catch up with a chord change, you hold on and hang on because you know he is a storyteller, and one who deserves to be heard and acknowledged. There's rock, blues, country, folk, and even a bit of worldly flavor. When he has a story to tell, he does so with passion. When he sits down on the patio to jam as the rain falls, he does this too, as he does with J. Adams on djembe in "Drunk Buddha", or as he does in "Katrina", he lays on a bluesy electric guitar solo where you can feel a bit of the sorrow and hurt that is expressed in his playing.
The CD cover has him just playing an acoustic guitar and the drums (which he often plays at the same time, one-man band style), but his music is not as simple as the cover suggests. Homemade and proud!
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