This collaboration between the blues King and his most famous courtier is a marketer's dream. Thanks to Clapton's star power, King rides into Billboard's Top 10, a territory he does not often visit. For Clapton, the opportunity to bask in the glow of the master is clearly something he relishes. In previous excursions into the blues, he has come across as both down in the mouth and overly reverent. By contrast, King makes the blues a thing of joy, never a downer. While he sings about hard times and heartbreak, he is not their prisoner. Luckily, the lesson seems to have rubbed off on Clapton, who sounds less dour than he did on his 1994 blues homage From the Cradle. Despite the photo above, B.B. King is the one in the driver's seat here. While both players wring emotion from their guitars, King proves the more expressive, making his sweet Lucille laugh as well as cry. And where his powerful yet effortless vocals blow through the album like a force of nature, Clapton has to make do with a much less resonant instrument. But if it takes Clapton's clout to make King's sublime blues heard, we thank him for it.
Bottom Line: Master class
Darryl Worley (Dream Works)
Worley grew up in notorious Hardin County, Tenn., once the battleground of moonshiners and rev-enuers, where some folks still prefer to get their sour mash from a neighbor's backwoods still rather than traipse into town for the packaged kind. The 35-year-old singer-songwriter is steeped in the region's colorful lore and legend-not to mention its white-lightning-pure country music. That background serves him well here as he showcases his double-threat talent on this impressive debut CD. With a smoke-cured voice and an easy, back-porch-swing delivery, Worley sounds as lived-in as an old denim shirt. And his songs seem as inevitable as the Tennessee River, which runs by his family's home near the Civil War's Shiloh battle site. "I'm tired of workin' every day for a dollar/I could choke on my own blue collar," he sings on "A Good Day to Run," a driving song worthy of being blared from a souped-up pickup. And he displays a good ear for Tennessee talk on a rousing drinking song about getting "Sideways" at the local juke joint.
Bottom Line: Country routes music
>TRUE LOVE True Love (cropduster.com) Quick, before they're signed! This trio of Hoboken, N.J., power-pop cats has joined a Web collective of hip indie bands (www.crop duster.com) to market this CD of short, sharp, neo-new-wave gems.
THE BEST OF P.M. DAWN P.M. Dawn (Gee Street/V2) Lovely melodies and high, soaring harmonies are not attributes always associated with hip-hop music. But these two New Jersey rappers wrap their rhymes in just such rare, rich textures.
OUTBOUND Béla Fleck & the Fleck-tones (Columbia) Call it jazzgrass. Banjo plucker extraordinaire Fleck leads her band through a rousing, mostly instrumental song cycle with vocal interludes provided by Shawn Colvin and Jon Anderson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
