As juke-joint gladiators go, Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes held his own. More than that, actually—having held sway over Greenville, Mississippi’s notorious Nelson Street through the 1980s and into the ’90s. Its stretch of nightclubs, pool halls, and dives carried quite the reputation. 1991’s Mississippi Delta Travelers’ Guide balanced the section’s rewards in “searching out the real nitty-gritty blues” with the dangers of “drugs, vice and violence.”
Such was Barnes’ kingdom. After years of gigging up and down the strip’s sordid hotspots, he opened his own. A former used-furniture store became the cavernous, tumbledown Playboy Club, where he and his Playboys dished out adrenaline on Friday and Saturday nights. Tough, cathartic, urban blues did the trick.
Yet for all his regional celebrity, Booba’s discography was beyond anemically thin. Outside of an isolated track or two here and there (including Deep Blues, the landmark documentary and accompanying soundtrack), 1990’s The Heartbroken Man was his one-and-done album. Shortchanging that output all the more was deteriorating health that ultimately (and prematurely) took him in 1996. He hadn’t yet turned 60.
Booba has been gone for 28 years now—but, thankfully, there ain’t no grave that can hold his energized blues down. And that’s why Raw Unpolluted Blues—a pairing of two very-alive live sets from 1991—is oh-so special. First, his stack of albums just doubled. Plus, when heard belting out his signature “Heartbroken Man,” a personal declaration bled from his own double-crossed heart over a persistently charging pulse, it’s as if he’s no longer gone. It sounds like another vibrant night at the Playboy Club.
Here, though, he and his lean, no-nonsense trio (no glitzy horns, no slick keyboards) are not inside their Delta lair; they’re on the road. Far outside of the Mississippi border: Davenport, Iowa’s Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. And farther yet: Italy’s Nave Blues Festival. Regardless of the setting, Barnes maintains the same tense, taut guitar lines wrapped in a sheet-metal tone, especially when contrasted against Lil’ Dave Thompson’s moderated second guitar. The solos, bare-handed from the strings, erratically twitch like zigzag lightning. “How Long This Must Go On,” another original, wildly fibrillates; the stately resignation of B.B.’s “The Thrill Is Gone” hardens under juke guidelines. Even through the calm, composed storming of “Ain’t Gonna Worry About Tomorrow,” that guitar remains anxious. Although you cannot see him plucking strings with his teeth or playing while straddling the axe between his legs, rest assured those antics are ongoing like back home. Because, at a minimum, Barnes was a showman.
The Davenport show uniquely offers an extended listen to Barnes’ prowess on the instrument that started him juking in the 1950s: the harmonica. “Baby, Scratch My Back” and “No Place to Go” (a “How Many More Years” variant) are among a suite showcasing his own downhome manner of harping. You can hear Sonny Boy Williamson II’s style having rubbed off first in how melodies and solos get slurped before Howlin’ Wolf eventually became his main man.
Completing the performance package is a voice just as judiciously wiry and thorny to match. It shows no mercy, running just as roughshod over the extra-spicy couplets strung together for “What’s I’d Say” as when painstakingly piling up the crushing pain of “You Must Be Lovin’ Someone Else.” Every so often, Barnes will even do you one better by compressing that throaty scratch down into a squalid croak, using you-know-whose patented technique. So, the setlist’s prevalence of Wolf songs—from the romping shuffle “Tell Me What I’ve Done/My Last Affair” to the chest-thumping “300 Pounds of Joy”—is no coincidence.
A rare—raw and unpolluted—gift appearing from out of the blue: One more jolting hour with Booba Barnes.
Label: New Shot Records
Release Date: 5/3/24
Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski
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