Consumer Guide Album

Guy Davis: The Legend of Sugarbelly [M.C., 2024]
Now 72, Ossie and Ruby's inheritor has long been classified a blues singer, but on this album I'd make him more what in his youth was called a folksinger, and one who showcases his own material at that. Up front, where he's mostly getting laid, he's less a dog than a rounder and less a rounder than a deeply affectionate male human being: "I know you love another man but that's all right/Every now and then I get to wonder/Who's gonna love you tonight." And though I couldn't swear how new most of these lyrics are (two Leadbelly copyrights, for one thing), one of their several charms is that many of his own feel like they could go either way. "I dream the same dream every night/I dream the same dream every night/Darkness comes and tries to steal my light," for instance. Or "Had a special pair of shoes that he kept in a sack/Had a heel in the front and a heel in the back/Riley took off when he heard the hounds coming/Couldn't tell which way Riley was running." Or "10,000 biscuits in each hand/He sopped his way to the promised land." Or "Musta been a bedbug/Cause a chinch can't bite that hard." Or even "He ran across the water like Jesus Christ." A-