Swamp Dogg’s ‘Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St’ is a warm and absorbing mix of the new and old, an attention-grabbing seamless blend of bluegrass/country and soul, topped off with his underrated persuasive vocal delivery and unique presence.
Singer, songwriter, and producer Jerry Williams Jr. adopted the alias Swamp Dogg in 1970 and has arguably been soul music’s most eclectic and idiosyncratic personality ever since. The ‘Blackgrass’ in the title of his new album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, is a reclaiming of the true origins of bluegrass music, just as other black artists have done, perhaps most notably Rhiannon Giddens, who, in addition to her music, made Black Roots, a fascinating 3-part series for BBC Radio 4 in 2022. Swamp Dogg explains: “Not a lot of people talk about the true origins of bluegrass music, but it came from Black people. The banjo, the washtub, all that stuff started with African Americans. We were playing it before it even had a name. I’m trying to touch on every kind of music I grew up loving and listening to. This is my way of letting people know that I’m not just a soul singer or whatever they think I am. I’m so much more”. The album is dedicated to John Prine.
After limited chart success with his own records in the 1950s and early, mid 1960s, Jerry Williams Jr (as he was still known) switched to production and song writing, including a spell at Atlantic Records. As Swamp Dogg, beginning with 1970s Total Destruction to Your Mind (which included the superb ecology song Synthetic World, later covered by Jimmy Cliff), he has since continued to put out records on a regular basis. He also produced albums by some of the very best soul singers, including Doris Duke, Irma Thomas, Z.Z. Hill and Solomon Burke. His songwriting covers a range of themes and topics, all of which are represented on the 81-year-old’s irresistible new album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, which revisits a good number of his late 1960s and early 1970s songs written for others, as well as 1950s pop songs.
Earl Scruggs like driving banjo, played by Noam Pikelny (Punch Brothers), kicks off the risqué Mess Under That Dress, which, together with Sierra Hull’s mandolin and Billy Contreras’s fiddle, maintains a persistent pace, Hull providing a brief but delicious mandolin break mid-song. The less frenetic Ugly Man’s Wife stays with Swamp Dogg’s humorous side, with Jerry Douglas interspersing his familiar dobro between the vocals. Have a Good Time demonstrates Swamp Dogg’s vocal versatility, delivering a feel-good version of a pop song first released in 1952 by Tony Bennett while avoiding any syrupy, crooning excess, helped by his rather careworn-sounding singing. In a similar vein is the Floyd Tillman song Gotta Have My Baby Back, a hit for Ella Fitzgerald in 1949, which improbably succeeds in melding period strings and sax with mandolin runs.
A stately marching bluegrass accompaniment gives Margo Price an ideal platform for a delightful version of To The Other Woman, a classic Swamp Dogg infidelity song, first released in 1970 by Doris Duke. He returns to a song he produced in 1967 for Inez & Charlie Foxx – Count The Days – for an infectious duet with Jenny Lewis, double bass providing a suitably loping, swinging rhythm and soulful backing group. There are versions of two relatively obscure Swamp Dogg songs from his days at Atlantic Records, originally recorded in 1969. Your Best Friend, first recorded by The Drifters and later by Doris Duke, starts with an urgent clarion call from Jerry Douglas’s dobro, has a similarly urgent vocal with harmony backing chorus, and ends with a quirky echoing, distorted vocal with a backing chorus and double bass. The Commodores, pre-Motown, first recorded Rise Up, much in a Sly & the Family Stone mode. That sensibility is impressively retained here with the rhythm provided by banjo, mandolin, and double bass, and weirdly further enhanced by the addition of appropriately screechy electric guitar by Living Colour’s Vernon Reid. The unambiguous meaning of the song is strongly emphasised by virtue of the intoned title being the only words.
Swamp Dogg’s singing on the simple love song This Is My Dream is exquisite, with aptly understated accompaniment. For me, the standout track is a revisiting of Songs To Sing, a song Swamp Dogg wrote and produced in 1971 as a single for a little-known singer called Charlie Whitehead, who recorded at that time under the name Raw Spitt and which became a deep soul favourite through the advocacy of the late Dave Godin. It’s one of Swamp Dogg’s best social commentary songs about the state of the world at that time. He sings: ‘I’ll sing about a people that want to be free. I’ll sing about a generation that’ll help it to be. I’ll sing about a change that’s just about to come. I’ll sing about equality for everyone’. The backing is ideally simple, just plucked rolling banjo, bass, and discreet guitar, with horns and string instruments mixed into the song’s second half. It’s a compelling centre piece, Swamp Dogg’s singing disarming and tender yet always gritty.
For those wondering if Swamp Dogg’s genre swapping is a gimmick of sorts, his last but one effort, 2020s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It (reviewed here), also produced by Ryan Olson, who produces Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, was billed as his country album and included two duets recorded with John Prine just before he died. One of Prine’s best-known songs, Sam Stone, was recorded definitively by Swamp Dogg in 1972, and in dedicating the new album to Prine (it’s also released on Prine’s Oh Boy record label), he writes that the song “was a hit for me and continues to be my closing number. It has never failed to get a standing ovation everywhere I perform it”.
Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St is an even better album than Sorry You Couldn’t Make It. It has primarily acoustic accompaniment, giving a warm and empathetic sound while absorbing a variety of new and old songs, all of which make for an attention-grabbing seamless blend of bluegrass/country and soul, with Swamp Dogg’s underrated persuasive vocal delivery and unique presence always at the forefront, drawing your attention. In his own words: “Believe it or not, I didn’t do anything but sing these songs the way I would have sung them if it was an R&B album. That’s just the way the music comes out of me, and it would have been unholy for me to try and imitate anybody else. The only thing I know how to do is be myself.”