If having your first name added to the name of your band is a bellwether for burgeoning celebrity, then you could say 22-year-old Davy Knowles has arrived. A British blues guitarist with a soulful baritone, Knowles has sort of an Stevie Ray Vaughan-meets-Richie Havens thing going on. His band, Back Door Slam Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam, released an album earlier this summer called Coming Up For Air. Produced by Peter Frampton, the record is very much pop with a blues sensibility, rather than the other way around.

In many ways, Knowles & BDS sounds like the younger brother of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals; both jam-ish blues-pop bands with lead singers who have great pipes and love to show them off—the main difference being that Knowles plays guitar, and Potter plays keyboards your heartstrings.

Speaking of Knowles’s weapon-of-choice, the dude flat-out shreds. For guitar nerds, this will be well worth the drive to Alexandria.

DAVY KNOWLES & BACK DOOR SLAM, TONIGHT @ BIRCHMERE, 7:30 P.M. $20

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

Read More “‘We’re All In This Together’: Route 29 Revue @ Merriweather” »

There is a whole genre’s worth of performers who draw large crowds throughout the American South (and parts of the North) and who sell a sizeable amount of music, but rarely get mainstream media press, rock website attention, or airplay on stations that program for younger folks. I’m talking Chitlin Circuit soul aka Southern Soul. As these artists occasionally draw from a related 12 bar song form, the promoter is billing the traveling festival hitting Showplace Arena, 14900 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Upper Marlboro, Maryland Friday night March the 13th at 8 as “The Blues is Alright Tour,” and locally as “The Capitol Blues Festival.” However, do not expect beer commercial style guitar heroics.

With a roster featuring Clarence Carter, Marvin Sease, Latimore, Mel Waiters, and Roy C., the focus will be on earthy lyrics about drinking, womanizing, hanging out, and memories of good ol’ days. While the artists can get raunchy, Marvin Sease does “The Candy Licker,” Mel Waiters has the “Get It On Song,” and veteran performer Clarence Carter does “Strokin,’” all of the performers also have some storytelling lyrics that work thanks to their gospel-rooted vocals and upbeat keyboard, bass and drum backing rhythms.

One of my fave albums in the genre is Mel Waiters’ 2006 Throwback Days. Waiters’ warm syllable-stretching beautifully conveys the melancholy message of the title cut, while he gets raspier on the upbeat “Friday Night Fish Fry.” I talked briefly on the phone with Waiters.

Read More “Southern Soul Concert Friday and Interview with Participant Mel Waiters” »