Blackjack by Clarence Gatemouth Brown (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Blackjack

Artist name: Clarence Gatemouth Brown

Year: 1977

Number of discs: one

Label: Music Is Medicine

Collection: Friedman

Buy it on Amazon: $20.25

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I have never listened to this record, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Clarence Gatemouth Brown before today.

What I expected

Country, blues.

What it was actually like

This was pretty good, and extremely varied.

Pressure Cooker was a jazz instrumental that I thought was great, with guitars and horns playing off each other really well, and Honey Boy was in a similar fast style.

Tippin’ In was also an instrumental and was still jazzy, but had more of a soft rock sound. It had some good country guitar, but I did not like its flute at all. Nor did I like the flute’s return on Gate’s Tune, an easy listening song that I thought was one of the record’s worst (the actual worst was Street Corner, which mostly consisted of useless sound effects).

The best, however, was When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again, a Cajun-sounding up tempo instrumental that I would be happy to hear multiple times. I also thought that Up Jump the Devil, which approximated a bluegrass style – with Oompa Loompa drums – and steel guitar was really good.

Another Oompa Loompa song was Take Me Back to Tulsa, a sort of hybrid Oompa Loompa polka country rock instrumental that was very up tempo.

The weirdest was Chickenshift, which was notable for using the guitar to make a bok-bok chicken sound.

The title track Blackjack, a guitar jam with lots of cymbals, was on the boring side. I also did not care very much for Here Am I, a slow blues song with vocals, or Dark End of the Hallway, which was also slower, but had a strong country style fiddle.

Grade

4/5: would listen again