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Another musician I really like is Steve James. Steve is a very traditional country style blues acoustic guitarist. Steve is very traditional musically and his covers of material by the likes of Leadbelly are amazing. He handles that material with the respect it deserves, not trying to update it, not trying to make it more hip, he performs it as it is. In a way, Steve James seems to be plucked right out of the 1920's or 30's.

Steve is one of my favorite songwriters in his own right, though. His songs are traditional in their sound, and often in their subject matter. Like any blues songwriter a lot of his songs are about relationships ("The blues started when Adam met Eve"), but it doesn't stop there. In Last Good Car he laments that automobiles aren't what they used to be, that they have a funny little voice that says "put your seatbelt on." I don't think Robert Johnson ever wrote a song quite like that, though he seemed to really like his Terraplane.

Talaco Girl is a beautiful slice of life song about the changes in a small town, "coin laundry got a video game and fire took the grocery store." The Change is an extremely odd song that includes advice given by "celery (that had been) in that mayonaise jar so long that it had discorporated on a molecular level and reincorporated with an intelligence of it's own....." Not exactly standard in your classic country blues song.

He writes the relationship song really well, and like any blues songwriter it is his bread and butter. Grain Alcohol is the only Steve James composition that I've ever attempted to play. It's one of his songs that easy enough for me to play and, frankly, it rings really true with me:

Grain Alcohol

The glass is on the table
The whiskey's in the glass
My fist through the sheet rock
You picture in the trash
My mind in the gutter
My pride before a fall
Adrift on a river of grain alcohol

I don't know where you are tonight
But I bet you're not alone
Don't you worry about me I've got
Freinds of my own
Jim Beam, Johnnie Walker
And four girls named Rose
They don't even care
If I sleep in my clothes

Grain alcohol
That's all I need
Built for comfort not for speed
I can pick up the pieces
Watch the pieces fall
I live on livin' on
Grain alcohol

They tell me I'll be gettin'
Over you before long
That I'll live again and love again
But, baby, they're wrong
They say the darkest hour
Is just before the light
I know that for certain
I'm there every night

Not unique, I know. Every guy who's written music has written a song like this. But every guy who's ever heard a song like this swears he knows who it was written about. I'm certain Steve wrote it about an old girlfriend of mine.

While it's probably not my favorite Steve James song, the song I've been thinking about most recently is Banker's Blues. I've toyed with the idea of trying to play it and maybe add an additional verse about Kenneth Lay of Enron fame. I'd have to change it so dramatically to be able to play it with my fat, stupid fingers that I'm not sure I'll ever do it. I really like it the way he does it and changing it to fit my inferior guitar skills would be a crime. The first verse of Banker's Blues sets the tone:

I saw your face on the news today
I seen it there before
And if I'm a judge of character
I'll see it there some more
You got rich off of worthless real estate
And a broke down oil well
But you got friends in the government
And the tax man pays your bills

We see guys like this on the news every day. They bilk the government, investors and shareholders out of millions of dollars. They're criminals, plain and simple. Corporate crime simply isn't treated like other types of crime in this count. ry for some reason:

You and some other criminal
Both stood before the bar
Your fraud it was for millions
He'd stolen a VCR
You pulled probated sentence
And a hundred thousand fine
They sent him back to Huntsville
Where he's serving five to nine

It's age old, the rich don't serve the same penalties. While blues generally tends to be relationship based rather than socially based, this is a recurring theme in blues songs, particularly early blues. Steve James has taken this old theme and updated it. It's still traditional, it still sounds like blues from the 30's, but it's written about a contemporary issue. That, I think, is Steve's strength as a songwriter.

So he's a great songwriter, but I also love his fingerpicking guitar style. He's great as a solo, he also duets with a guitarist named Del Rey and many of his albums feature songs with Steve in an ensemble setting. Always acoustic, but he reminds me how powerful music can be even if it isn't plugged in.

BOJ