Friday, July 08, 2016

New Music 2016 - Part 39 - Miss Tess - Baby, we all know

Here is the highlight of the week in newly released recorded music, at least for me. I don't expect this to find its way in to the UK charts anytime soon but I'd love to be wrong about that. It may well not bother the mainstream American charts but we needn't worry about that either. It's quite beyond that kind of label nonsense anyway. It is released on Rights Records, via CDbaby.


Miss Tess - Baby, we all know (Rights Records, 8 July 2016).

It is eleven original songs that, along with her band 'The Talkbacks', expound a take on the delta and swamp blues from another perspective --- that of a young, white female. This is not her first release and that is a line of inquiry well worth pursuing. In the meantime I'm going with this one from the latest LP, despite the fact that I think that it will not remain my favourite.


There is also *that* acoustic guitar sound. It sounds old, far older than its player however adept she may be, because it is:


It is a Weymann archtop that is fast approaching its centenary. It is still doing exactly what it was made for.

Here's a question for you all:
Why do American artists still write so many songs about catching trains (which they can't/don't) while UK artists writing in similar genres (
who do/could) have never really done so to any great extent?
If frustration and anger is a source of songs, and it seems that it is, we should have an unimpeachable canon of railway songs - unfettered in prospect - from the mid-nineteenth century to today...
Tell me.

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