Tales from East End Blvd is the latest from Husky Burnette, and it is awesome. If you like good stories and sweet dirty rockin’ blues, you need to add this to your collection right now.
Here are two of my favorite tracks:
Beat & Low Down, because if this song doesn’t make you want to either dance or commit indiscretions or both, I don’t know what will:
Husky Burnette - Beat & Lowdown
On My Way, because it is a sober, sorrowful, prayer of song; the summation of a lifetime of pain and hard work accompanied by spare, delicate picking.
I think of myself less as a “music blogger” than as a music pusher (cue Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman”), and Husky Burnette deals in just the kind of illicit substances I like best: a rough voice, a dirty groove and a foot-stomping beat. Hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they seem to grow ’em like that, Burnette’s music is, as Rick Saunders once put it, “hunched, sweatin’, swaggerin’ and all up on ya.”
Coming from the same lineage that brought us Johnny and Dorsey Burnette (you may know Johnny as the singer of “You’re Sixteen”) and having put some time in with folks like Roger Alan Wade, Husky is doing his own thing now, playing his blues and working it hard. His latest album Facedown in the Dirt is out now and it’s full of thumpin’ and bumpin’ and even a little grindin’.
Check out some righteous footage of one of Burnette’s recent gigs down in America’s sweaty penis (i.e., Florida), rockin’ a fiery rendition of “Stagger Lee”, accompanied by Philip Westfall on banjo cello and Rick Saunders beating the skins. Because that’s how ya do it.
