“I’m a certified senior citizen/Got Florida on my mind/I won’t even mess/With checkers or chess/Just take me to the place where they bump ‘n’ grind….”

Though not characterized by the bump ‘n’ grind, Sunday’s 10 p.m. show at Blues Alley drew a rapt and well-dressed crowd of LP nerds, precocious twenty-somethings, and couples in search of an atmospheric canoodle to see Mose Allison, a man whom Pete Townshend once dubbed “the Blues Sage.”

Mose knows, as the saying goes. And more to the point, he still puts on one hell of a show.

It is now 50 years since Allison’s first release—the groovy Back Country Suite, with which Richard Fariña fell in love—and 80 since his birth, but heck if he ain’t still the cat of cats. His elegant blues (or is it demotic jazz?) is as sharp as ever, his swagger intact, his delivery sly but unaffected (few bluesman can pull off a phrase like “your little psychic walkabout”). Joined by Tony Martucci on drums and Tommy Cecil on bass, Allison stuck almost exclusively to originals, and his few covers tended less toward Nat “King” Cole smoothness and more toward the down-home stuff of Lefty Frizzell (”If You’ve Got the Money…”) and Muddy Waters (a fantastic “Catfish Blues”).

Punctuating each quip with a sneaky piano lick, Mose kept the interstitial passages jumping with manic rhythm in the right hand over the left hand’s open fifth/stride patterns—funky enough to make middle-aged white cats in wraparound shades convulse with (or against) the music, but not so frenetic as to threaten the breeziness of lyrics like “If silence was golden/You couldn’t raise a dime.”

There’s something tremendously boyish about an 80-year-old singing this stuff. Allison has always been an insistent naïf (with a nod, of course, and a wink), but now he seems doubly so. Sure, he occasionally finds himself a bit short of breath, and his upper register may have shriveled somewhat; but the sheer delight he takes in his own contradictions seems more exuberant, more self-evident—unshriveled, one might say, by the miles and the years. A “certified senior citizen” by his own account, Allison has broadened the facetious strain in his blues to make old age seem pretty cool.

In other words, the fellow who taught “Young Man’s Blues” to the Who certainly seems to be enjoying the fruits of his own senility.

It’s not just the ever-present half-smile, not just his private scat (which through the years has morphed from a Neal Cassady-type exhortation to a vaguely apprehensive creaking sound), not just an evergreen predilection, in both composition and interpretation, for the zippy one-liner…it’s the reactive dissonance of the old man singing the songs of youth, the wise guy playing the innocent, the white boy stealing the blues.

Parchman Farm:

Young Man’s Blues:

Set list, and recommended discs, below.

Oh, and here’s a video of “Mind on Vacation”:

Sunday’s 10 p.m. setlist:

• “Just Like Livin’”
• “Fool’s Paradise”
• “Swingin’ Machine”
• “Days Like This”
• “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”
• “Trouble In Mind”
• “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”
• “Certified Senior Citizen”
• “Ever Since I Stole the Blues”
• “How Does It Feel? (To Be Good-Looking)”
• “What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life”
• “Middle-Class White Boy”
• “That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch”
• “Hello There, Universe”
• “Your Mind is on Vacation”
• “Catfish Blues”
• “This Ain’t Me” (encore)

Recommended discography:

• Back Country Suite (1957)
• The Seventh Son (1972)
• Middle-Class White Boy (1982)

…and, of course, the totally fun Greatest Hits (Prestige), to which Christgau gives the most lukewarm A- in CG history. Though it does overlap prodigiously with The Seventh Son.

Thanks to a tip from a smart reader, we checked into the Bo Diddley-lived-here thesis. It’s true. Diddley lived at 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE in the ’60s. [OK--the reader had all the facts completely correct]. He talks about living here in a Washington Post feature published in 2006:

Diddley lived here from 1959 to 1966, building a studio in the basement of his house at 2614 Rhode Island Ave. NE, where he recorded 1960’s classic Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger album.

“I just wanted to be in Washington, D.C., around the Howard Theater,” Diddley explains. “I did everything from D.C. At that time, I was driving all the time — I didn’t start flying until 1968 — and it was close to New York and the South.”

I checked with The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. The address has not been registered as a historic landmark. I will have more in a bit.

Update 10 a.m. June 4: The 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE property is not listed as a landmark or part of a historic district, according to Kim Williams, the national register coordinator with the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. She goes on to say no application has been filed on behalf of that property in the last seven years. She’s “almost 100 percent sure” there has never been a landmark application submitted.

“If there are preservation organizations or neighborhood groups that are interested in having it designated, we will consider it,” Williams says.

Bo Diddley has died. This sucks. Despite the fact that he was long past his hipster prime, he still rocked a lot of group house parties–specifically mine. I picked up his greatest hits on vinyl for cheap and would always crank up “Mona.”

So thank you, Bo Diddley.

In this week’s New Yorker, staff writer Burkhard Bilger has a good article about American folk music. It’s not online, but it’s worth seeking out.

Not only does he interview Frederick, MD’s Joe Bussard, a 78 collector who has been the subject of several Washington City Paper features (Eddie Dean’s and Andrew Beaujon’s), but he also makes some worthwhile points about American folk music and its pursuit (whether by collectors or those making field recordings).

Most interesting to me—especially having grown up around adults who, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, were still in the thrall of the fifties folk revival—is how many of those musicians, such as Robert Johnson, who—especially since the ‘60s—has been written about in mythical, almost god-like terms, owe their legend to serendipity.

Bilger writes:

“Fame in folk music can be less a matter of talent than of opportunity, [down-to-Earth folk revivalist Art Rosenbaum] said. People talk about the Delta blues because Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were from Mississippi. But if H.C. Speir hadn’t opened his music store in Jackson we might talk about Georgia Blues instead.”

And then there’s the whole issue of authenticity—finding artists untouched by the modern world. This is like manna for folk-hunters. (When Leadbelly came to New York, Bilger writes, noted folklorist John Lomax “told him to put on prison stripes.”) But Bilger notes that even some of ye olde biggies might not stand up to present-day standards:

“When John Lomax first recorded the blues, the genre was newer than hip-hop is today, and both Leadbelly and Robert Johnson learned songs from records.”

None of this invalidates a good song (and Johnson, especially, wrote quite a few), but it would seem to invalidate the collecting and compiling concept that anything that’s old and, um, folky is worth transferring and cleaning up. Some recordings you’ve never heard of because they just weren’t very good.

Now comes news via DCist that B.B. King is scheduled to be rolled out on to the Strathmore’s stage. The DCist poster with the misfortune of hyping this news gives it their best spin:

While Father Time has taken away some of King’s technique and forced him to perform seated, his soul is firmly intact and he still packs an emotional wallop every time he sings or plays a note.

But let’s be honest here. King makes one hate the blues in the same way Leno makes one hate comedy. King’s schtick is a tired one. Someone should just take Lucille out to pasture and tell Mr. King that he’s best on TV informing the public on the best way for diabetics to test their blood.

For one more weekend, anyway. If anything at all about the early ’50s, pre-rock notion of R & B appeals to you, check out A Nite at the Dew Drop Inn, which holds its final performances this Friday - Sunday at H Street Playhouse.

Dew Drop Inn is not a concert, per se; it’s a musical cabaret that local company Theater Alliance put together as a substitute for its over-budget adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. But if the minimal production–featuring a piano and no props other than a “DEW DROP INN” sign scrawled in paint on the back wall–feels a little thrown together, the performances more than compensate. Gospel pianist Ralph Alan Herndon’s great blues licks, and his role as the wisecracking accompanist, cloaks his extraordinary repertoire and finesse in expressing it. But his solo performance of Bessie Smith’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” and his leading the five-member ensemble on the inspirational “That Lucky Ol’ Sun,” gives the game away.

Though the other four performers also have stock roles, there’s no overstating what they bring to the production, either. Stephawn P. Stephens, as the slick ladies’ man, and Andy Torres, as the clown, understand the raw sexuality of the music, while Yvette Manson channels Bessie, Ma Rainey, and Ida Cox the brash, ballsy women who made the blues the major musical style of the 20th century. Then, of course, there’s young-lover Kimberly Spencer-McLeod; the Washingtonian is the most virtuosic performer of them all, switching with ease from the sassy R&B “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” to an elegant tribute to Dinah Washington.

And that’s just the music: there’s also the humor, the somehow-timeless recreation of a forgotten era, and the sly ways that the audience participates. But that’s best left to the experience itself: Any other live performance this year will have a tough time outdoing the small-scale theatrics of A Nite at the Dew Drop Inn.

Having said my piece about PR people vis-à-vis leak culture, I figure it’s only fair to write about some of the records that show up in my mailbox unsolicited.

This week I got promos from two local hard rock acts, Sterling’s Pygmy Lush and Germantown’s Clutch.

Well, actually, to call Pygmy Lush a hard-rock act is only halfway right. The band—which includes a couple members of pageninetynine, another Sterling act I wrote about a couple years back—performs two kinds of songs: country-rock that is country in the Cormac McCarthy sense of the word (think Black Heart Procession and recent Earth), and country-rock that is country in the metallic sense of the word (think: a bunch of kids in Slayer shirts hanging out at Sheetz). On its latest Robotic Empire release, Bitter River, Pygmy Lush is good at both, even if the record is, at times, a bit schizophrenic.

Clutch, on the other hand, does one thing and one thing only. On its eighth and latest album, From Beale Street to Oblivion (sent to me by the kind folks at Action! PR), the band combines blues and hardcore with aplomb. It’s an odd sound, if only because so few bands make the connection anymore. But Clutch does it well, suggesting a modernized version of bluesy seventies rock acts such as Blodwyn Pig and first-album-era Black Sabbath. In other words, this is metal that sounds like a beer commercial on ‘roids. The band just started a long US tour and will be appearing at 9:30 Club on November 25th.

At first I was pretty sure that Green Bay, Wisconsin’s Pink Reason was more backstory than substance. Everything I read about him seemed to arrive with a lengthy preamble about “shooting Drano in his parents crawlspace for five years,” or some similar cred-building drug-myth-horseshit. I guess if you smoke some meth and bang out some psychedelic gutter-jams there’s a whole culture of people who will go out and buy your record.

I mean, I bought it. Well, I bought the “Throw it Away” 7-inch, and I was sort of surprised to find that after all that talk it just sounded like Brian Jonestown Massacre played at half speed–which I guess it qualifies as psychedelic but not particularly engaging.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Pink Reason. The newer stuff seems scuzzier, more abrasive and more exciting.

However it is I or anybody else feels about Pink Reason, Brooklyn’s Blues Control will no doubt be worth seeing. No other group could ever hope to splice Harold Budd with Mountain’s Nantucket Sleighride and come out alive.

Both bands perform this Thursday at 611 Florida Ave.

Courtesy of the very fine blog Moistworks, Howlin’ Wolf’s “So Glad” from 1956. Great for the BBQ. Great for the car ride to this place. Just great.