Daddy Mack Blues Band — Doctor’s Orders

The key is not to do anything understated. Slight, nuanced and restrained have no place here either. After all, Mack Orr has long reigned as king of Memphis bruiser blues, the kind that clobbers on a few different fronts. In blunt terms, “Daddy Mack” is brute force incarnate.

For starters, Orr still takes to a guitar with the assaultive intent that has landed him on barroom bandstands for a thousand Saturday nights. Solos are thorny, gruff and curt, forgo fancy peacocking, and burn their way off albums with a battered tone. Jump, for instance, to the midpoint of “Boss’s Wife,” a tale of double dipping, when that guitar of his and a likewise muscle-bound bass take a moment to arm wrestle in a show of raw might.

Not to be outdone, his bar-stained voice is naturally thick and hulking. As such, there’s no need to puff up or holler out like others do in order to command the situation. His is a hefty voice held in check, more or less. So even when only speaking the title of “Let Me Pull a Few Strings” every so often in between putting that offer into play on the fretboard, Orr’s strength still beams through. Opening Doctor’s Orders with that stampeding track—an instrumental—is, in itself, a gutty power move.

Extra buttressing comes from his ensemble plowing the rhythm with two more guitars (slide included) plus a harmonica in its ranks. Throwing their weight behind “I’ll Be On My Way” pounds the see-ya kiss-off against the wall. Call them what you will but these 11 original songs strung between an overabundance of woe and a shortage of sex live up to whatever tag gets used: workingman blues, meat-and-potato blues, Plain Man Blues (the title of the 2008 documentary film that tracks Orr from stage to studio).

Think: Magic Slim. Except that likewise guitar-brutalizing Mississippian kept trucking his own blues-fueled bulldozer all the way up into Chicago. Orr, on the other hand, set up shop far closer to where he was born in 1945: the rural town of Como, just a straight 50-mile shot up Highway 51 North into Tennessee. So, “Country Boy” rings true with its talk of living out yonder. “Mississippi Woman” also ties back, lyrically, to his roots across the border while throbbing, acoustically, at the hands of a steely, bottlenecked Dobro with a downhome harp for a wingman.

Orr’s reign accelerated with the fall of the Fieldstones in the 1990s. That Memphis institution, of which he was a rostered member, was such an integral part of the blues scene that any pilgrimage to the city would be deemed incomplete without a stop into Green’s Lounge to catch one of their sets. Out of its ashes arose the Daddy Mack Blues Band, which initially served as a viable outlet for displaced members to reconvene their chemistry. The first record, Fix It When I Can, arrived in 1999. (That’s the one with “Razor Blade,” a steadily pounded admission of double agony.) Since then, the band has evolved over the course of seven more albums—now capped off by Doctor’s Orders. Inside Sounds, a hometown Memphis label, devotedly houses that burly stockpile.

Of course, you don’t need to know any of that to get bowled over as the title track locks into its chunky, heavy-stepping groove. Or to quake from “Givin’ Up On Givin’ In” putting its heavy foot down. Or to stand awestruck when “Country Boy,” steamrolling in second gear, brutally wrings out notes from Orr’s poor guitar that crack under added stress from strings getting bent. Nope, you can just show up at the ringside seat Doctor’s Orders provides to this Memphis slugfest.

Label: Inside Sounds

Release date: 2/21/25

Label website: insidesounds.com

Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski