Easy Eye Sound celebrates the blues' timeless legacy at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl
The only trouble with musical revival eras is that it also requires that sounds you love are dying just a little bit more than before you're treated to loving them all over again.
On Wednesday night at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl, the blues exceeded this notion because an exciting musical event transpired related to Easy Eye Sound's just-released blues compilation "Tell Everybody."
For the past decade, rock stars The Black Keys and Easy Eye Sound Records have continued in an admirable and compassionate five-decade-long history of inspired creatives preserving America's blues legacy.
As Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney notes in a 2021 Tennessean feature, it's a legacy that extends into the band being tribute artists to America's foundational Black musical tradition.
"We've made hip-hop records, we've made blues records, but we also wouldn't be here if it weren't for everybody that was inspired by those guys."
Robert Finley: revived amid a revival
The "guy" who is the star of this revival is 69-year-old Robert Finley.
He stands over six feet tall and cuts a striking figure while seated on a long, deep brown leather couch in a Brooklyn Bowl dressing room.
Ever the showman before singing a note, he's clad in yellow snakeskin boots, a black cowboy hat, a western shirt and well-pressed slacks.
He's also spinning tales of recent worldwide treks to castles on mountainous French countrysides where he's drunk rare liquors after showcasing his considerable talents.
He's having a revived moment amid a revival.
His daughter, Christy (who joins him onstage as a backing vocalist), has neatly cornrowed his gray hair before him taking the stage in front of 1,500-plus people because he likes to take off his hat and bow when he receives a standing ovation, she notes.
"I don't like it when people just say that I sing and play the blues," he offers.
Ironically, he's speaking to The Tennessean before singing at the "Tell Everybody" release event.
"I mean, I've played the blues for over 50 years, but I can play anything. My family and I have been playing gospel for generations. Country and soul, too. When I was younger, I'd stand in front of jukeboxes and sing anything as well. Elvis, Ray Charles, anyone."
Finley's hometown of Bernice, Louisiana, is 100 miles from Texarkana, Texas.
Texarkana's equidistant to Choctaw Native American territory, Dallas, Vicksburg, Mississippi and Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Awareness of those proximities does well to explain his musical diversity.
"Tell Everybody" highlights the blues' continuing legacy
The album's musical diversity is noteworthy, too. If a musical revival bittersweetly idealizes a genre's remaining vestiges, it also highlights how a genre's legacy endures.
A press release calls the composition a "snapshot of 21st-century juke joint music" that "works to preserve the blues, uplift unsung voices in the genre and, in the process, build a thriving, multigenerational community."
Upon listening to the release, no lies are detected in the statement.
The Black Keys' sound (highlighted by Auerbach's solo "Every Chance I Get (I Want You In The Flesh)" and the band's "No Lovin'") is equal parts Western soul, Memphis funk and psychedelic folk. A press release describes Chicagoan Gabe Carter as a "youngblood." It's apropos. His garage-style blues add an earthy, revival-worthy grounding to stereotypically ethereal South Mississippi soul. Finley's title track sounds like Al Green's brimstone preaching by way of Albert King's smooth, funk-aided soul.
An hour after conversing with The Tennessean, the previously-mentioned Finley surprises a hooting and hollering capacity crowd by ripping into a cracking take on his latest single, "Sneakin' Around."
To wit, it features the same funk vamps and jump-blues moments as Otis Redding's 1967 classic "Tramp."
Otis Redding died prematurely in 1967, too.
At Brooklyn Bowl, just like all variants of the blues, soul, folk, funk and all related sonic derivations, Redding's alive.
The crowd isn't shouting because they're witnessing an astonishing resurrection.
Instead, they're hollering because Finely's doing a funky, seductive shake and squatting as if he's about to take the first pitch at a Nashville Sounds game at First Horizon Park next door.
"Man, at 69, I'm better at what I'm doing than I was at 29," Finley told The Tennessean before taking the stage.
He's not wrong.
It's on Finely's forthcoming fourth album in six years, six after being "discovered" while busking before a small gig in Arkansas. This, after a five-decade career that saw him play as an enlisted serviceman, part-time while pursuing carpentry after leaving the Armed Forces, plus inspiring multiple generations of his family also to pursue both secular and spiritual music.
"The only difference between the two is that for one, I'm saying "Oh god" and the other, I'm saying "Oh baby!"
Finley doesn't laugh. Instead, he smiles broadly and silently in a manner that's precisely the same as the cover of the new "Tell Everybody" album he's signing.
"Medicine woman, have pity on your man / Medicine woman, I know you understand / You know I got a deep need / That only you can fill / It don't come in no bottle, it don't come in no pill / Medicine woman, have pity on your man," he sings.
"Medicine Woman" is from Finley's 2017 album "Goin Platinum!"
If you ask him to sing it the same way twice, he probably can't. It's not because he has a poor memory or is losing his mind with age.
Instead, he's the type of artist who sings music from his soul, not from his memory.
Willing to continue talking in a manner where he excitedly recalls key component pieces to the answers to questions after they're asked, he offers more homespun wisdom that provides a sense of his artistry as a ministry instead.
"I go to church sometimes and realize that I'm still stunned that they replaced the wine with grape juice," he jokes.
"The people who need saving are those who need a small nip of wine every so often."
"That's why I figure I'm here," Finley continues. "A preacher has a congregation, but I get to sing music that could make people who need salvation in this crowd to feel sanctified," he adds.
Bentonia, Mississippi's retro-futuristic blues legacy
Jimmy "Duck" Holmes and Gabe Carter join Finley and The Black Keys on the billing.
The two bluesmen are separated by four decades of life but unified by the critically-acclaimed, mournful wail of Bentonia, Mississippi's rural sounds.
Holmes is the singer of songs like "Catfish Blues," but more importantly, for 51 years, he's been the proprietor of Bentonia, Mississippi's Blue Front Cafe. He wears a simple blue baseball cap with the name of his establishment in white letters.
He speaks of a world of global visitors there, all looking to understand the "mystery" of using a down-tuned guitar's open E-minor and D-minor chords to create haunting, echo-driven blues.
Holmes is the wisened griot in the room.
Just as the West African term's dictionary definition notes, he's a "historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, and musician who is a repository of oral tradition."
"Gabe doesn't think I recall, but I remember him coming down to Bentonia from Chicago 20 years ago to learn from me and watch me play," says Holmes, pointing a long, crooked, strumming-worn finger in the direction of Indiana-born, Michigan-bred and Mississippi blues-adoring Gabe Carter.
Carter's in a forest green tuxedo jacket with black silk lapels and wearing a dressy, cream-colored hat.
He arrived in the dressing room with his guitar case slung over his back like a backpack, as if he were still a student of a sound people believe him to have mastered.
That dichotomy informs his humility.
Carter speaks of legendary Mississippi blues artists like Skip James and Jack Owens as if he knows them as well as his parents or uncles.
"My mouth falls open and they blow me away for weeks, months and years. They're the most potent inspirations in my life."
Skip James died in 1969 and Jack Owens in 1997.
"We're from the same roots," says Carter.
Carter plays his album tracks "Anything You Need" and "Buffalo Road" onstage with a careful, studied excellence.
As the crowd loudly applauds both, his gratitude finally supersedes his humility.
He smiles broadly.
A "super nice thing"
The night at Brooklyn Bowl closes following a Black Keys set that Auerbach kicked into with minimal fanfare in deference to the bluesmen he's supporting. Yes, one in three people in the crowd is wearing a Black Keys t-shirt that identifies the acclaimed band's hometown as Akron, Ohio -- but tonight, more than usual, they're a gateway to the blues.
Thus, Finley's last word on the evening is best.
"It's super nice what Dan has going on here. It's inspired me to return home, open my own studio and get some demos working on local talent. This revival has changed my life.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Easy Eye Sound celebrates the blues' timeless legacy at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl
