Album Notes

—“It happened first in England a couple years ago,” Peter Lang says. “This guy introduced me as a ‘great American bluesman,’ not a folk guitarist. I got similar intros in Russia and Mexico and Italy. When it happened in New York, I knew what I had to do.” What Lang did was record his new CD “Testament,” a resurrection of his early blues roots and his 12th and most distinctive album,

A Grammy nominee and Minnesota native, Lang helped pioneer American finger-style guitar in the late 60s. After 20 years of being termed a “folk” artist, the guitar ace retired from touring to help raise his children. He resumed touring in 2002 on the east and west coasts and outside the U.S., this time singing the early blues that had inspired him to pick up a guitar as a child.

“Louis Armstrong said all music is ‘folk’ because horses don’t sing,” Lang said. “They started calling me a bluesman because they saw where my passion was. I’d played songs predating Robert Johnson, even plantation music, since I was ten or eleven. Jazz, country, rock, hip-hop, they’re all descendants of blues. I had to pay tribute to it.”

Outside of Lang’s amazing guitar, “Testament” differs from his previous work: All songs are covers of seminal early blues, and most have his rough-and-tumble vocals with a stripped-down rhythm section. “This is the southern working man’s pop music from the 19th century,” said Lang. “It’s what made everyone from Louis to the Beatles to Kanye possible.”