Luther Dickenson and the Cooperators ft. Shardé Thomas – 'Live 2016'

Originally posted to Instagram, December 30, 2020

People often ask me why the blues is my musical genre of choice. If I had to give one reason, it would be this: how many other genres have had 100 years of living, breathing, recorded history, and presumably many more years before it was ever recorded?

For at least the past 60 years, it’s been common to see the blues as a genre in terminal decline, something in need of being “kept alive”. Generations of old men from the American South have been called “the last bluesmen”. Clearly, if this has been going on for generations, those men weren’t and still aren’t the last. But the mentality that this music belongs to the past still persists. There are a lot of blues musicians who I don’t think live up to their potential, because they’re trying too hard to play it the way people did in Chicago in the 50s, or Clarksdale in the 30s. The fact is, you can’t play it that way unless you were there. There’s something much more powerful about being authentic to your own time and place. So here’s the blues the way they played it in Mississippi in the 2010s: Luther Dickinson, Sharde Thomas, and the Cooperators, Live 2016.

I first discovered the power combo of Dickinson and Thomas on a compilation of live recordings from Memphis, but since then, I’ve amassed a surprising number of blues records featuring Dickinson, Thomas, or both. Maybe it’s not surprising, since they both grew up living and breathing Southern music. Thomas’s handmade fife, an ancient instrument of the African diaspora, handed down from her grandfather and his father before him, may seem like an odd pairing with Dickinson’s electric guitar, but the instruments blend together in the hypnotic rhythm of the Mississippi hills, a rhythm first played on fifes and drums, and centuries later, played on guitars. Their voices are a perfect match as well, singing mostly original songs about classic blues subjects, love and death and hope and high water everywhere, including one, "Hurry Up Sunrise," inspired by Thomas’s grandfather.

One of the few old standards on this album is the beautiful “Station Blues”, better known as “Sitting On Top Of The World”, a song originally recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks. That goes back to my first point: how magical is it that a song from 1930 was still being reimagined in 2016? How much more magical is it to know that it will continue to be reimagined in the future?