In 1965, the Rolling Stones refused to appear on the ABC musical variety show Shindig! unless Chicago blues titan Howlin’ Wolf also got an on-air slot. The show’s producers acquiesced, and that May, the Wolfman enjoyed his first-ever national TV audience, commandingly growling out “How Many More Years” while the Stones sat adoringly at his feet. It wasn’t only a pivotal moment in the course of music history, but a radical one given the racial politics at play at the time. It also set an important standard that only the truest and noblest of the countless blue-eyed soul bands that followed the Stones have adhered to: If you’re going to play black music for a white audience, find some way to pay it back.
The Black Keys’s Delta Kream, an all-Mississippi blues covers album, is certainly a fine way to do just that. Picking up largely neglected threads from their early work, the album solidifies the Akron duo as one of the most vital and credible blues-rock bands active today (never mind a couple of misbegotten, unintentionally ironic comments from Jack White deriding them as “the watered-down version of the original”). Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney not only cover the likes of R.L. Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Junior Kimbrough, they also recruit Burnside’s guitarist Kenny Brown and Kimbrough’s bassist Eric Deaton, who enhance the rust-bucket authenticity of these swampy yet nimble renditions.
It’s been a while since the Black Keys have played the blues like this, but a decade removed from their commercial peak—and from their last consistently decent album, El Camino—Delta Kream is a welcome refresher in the musical modes that brought Auerbach and Carney together in the first place. And the fact that this album was recorded in a two-day session in late 2019 without any prior rehearsal underscores how deeply steeped the pair are in the Hill Country blues tradition they gamely attempt to revive here. Only a few of these songs will be recognizable to rock fans via previous versions by the likes of the Doors (“Crawling Kingsnake”), Eric Clapton (“Poor Boy a Long Way from Home”), and the Keys themselves (“Do the Romp,” a raggedier rendition of which previously appeared as “Do the Rump” on the band’s 2002 debut, The Big Come Up). But even in those cases, the Black Keys eschew any classic-rock references; these versions are transposed directly from the scratchy originals and largely manage to maintain the spooky, drone-y aura that defined them.
Those unconditioned to this classic American musical style may quickly grow weary of nearly an hour of guitar jamming over repetitive 12-bar progressions, but blues aficionados will treasure the utterly hypnotic interplay between Auerbach and Brown, and the depth of feeling in Auerbach’s soulful moan. With no overdubs to speak of, and casual studio chatter bookending most of the songs, there seems to be nothing calculated or produced about Delta Kream, underscoring the album’s off-the-cuff origins. Far from rote, though, it’s a reminder of why the Black Keys’s take on the blues was so intriguing in the first place.
Right from the beginning, Carney’s hip-hop-inspired beats distinguished the band from both their blues-rock influences and garage-rock revival peers, just like they do on “Crawling Kingsnake” and “Walk with Me.” Likewise, Auerbach’s slurred delivery on the former track recalls his similarly unintelligible vocals on the band’s ultra-grimy early period, while his slick-as-hell falsetto on “Going Down South” revives warm memories of the Brothers era.
Covering Kimbrough and his ilk is nothing new for the Black Keys, and this isn’t even the best example of them doing so (for that, see their 2006 EP Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough, almost certainly the most chilling and powerful electric Delta blues ever made by Midwestern white guys). But for Auerbach and Carney, paying off the debt they owe to their bluesman forebears is worth repeating themselves. Although they were sporadically active for decades, neither Kimbrough nor Burnside received much recognition until the ’90s, when their work first reached the ears of a young Auerbach, who might otherwise still be listening to G. Love & Special Sauce. Both men are now gone, so Auerbach and Carney can’t, say, finagle them a spot on The Voice. Resuscitating their timeless songs with the aid of their well-deserving sidemen is probably the next best thing.
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