Review: ‘Ronnie Baker Brooks – Blues in My DNA’
By Jim Hynes
Guitarist/songwriter/vocalist and searing blues-rocker Ronnie Baker Brooks has been a fixture on the Chicago blues scene for years. He has appeared as a headliner at the Chicago Blues Festival four times. It seems predestined that the son of the legendary bluesman Lonnie Brooks, would find a home at Alligator Records, just like his dad. Blues in My DNA is his fifth recording and first for the premiere blues label. Three were on his own label Watchdog Records, spanning 1998 through 2006 with his most recent on Provogue, 2017’s Times Have Changed, produced by Steve Jordan. He’s earned six BMA nominations. This is a musician who was raised in blues royalty, has paid his dues, and from the very beginning, has forged his own style that leans more heavily toward rock than traditional electric Chicago blues.
Allow me to share a story. In the late eighties, as a blues DJ in Connecticut, I had the honor of interviewing Lonnie Brooks at a club in Torrington, CT where a teenaged Ronnie Baker Brooks was his dad’s bassist. While Lonnie and I did the ‘first’ part of the interview before the call downstairs, “It’s star time,” we had agreed to finish the interview in the break between sets. After a blistering first set, I approached Lonnie, “Should we finish the interview, now?” He replied, “F**k the interview, let’s drink tequila.” I had little choice but to oblige. Fast forward 15 or so years later when I took a client to see Ronnie Baker Brooks open for Jimmie Vaughan at Chicago’s House of Blues. When I asked my client which band he liked better, he was clearly definitive in his choice of Ronnie Baker Brooks, who is as dynamic a performer in the past two decades as any blues artist. His dad taught him well.
Blues in My DNA presents Brooks’ trademark blues-rock style, incendiary guitar, and relatable lyrics well. The surprising part to me is that he doesn’t record with Chicago musicians, instead choosing names most associated with Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Yet, given the album was produced by Memphis area great Jim Gaines (Stevie Ray Vaughan, Santana, Lonnie Brooks, Luther Allison), the choice of these excellent musicians makes more sense. They are rhythm guitarist Will McFarlane, bassist Dave Smith, and drummer Steve Potts with these musicians and singers on select tracks – Rick Steff (electric piano). Clayton Ivey (B3), Brad Quinn (tenor and bari sax), Drew White (trumpet), and Trenicia Hodges and Kimberlie Helton (background vocals on “I Got to Make You Mine”). Brooks penned all tunes except for one co-written with his friend Todd Park Mohr, front man for Big Head Todd & The Monsters.
Ronnie Baker bursts out strong with the funky, high-octane guitar driven “I’m Feeling You.” In a nod to his dad, one of Alligator’s most vital artists during his time, you can hear him exhorting Ronnie “to keep these blues alive”. The title track offers more dynamic blues rock as Brooks singing triumphantly about overcoming hardship with the memorable lyric “I ain’t complaining, I’m just explaining.” He testifies soulfully on the crisp “My Love Will Make You Do Right,” quoting a line from Johnny Clyde Copeland “I’ll give my right arm.” He then turns sentimental, nodding to his late mother, Jeannine Baker, who passed away in 2023, with vintage styled Memphis ballad “Accept My Love” to which he adds a spiraling guitar solo and sings emotively.
The crunchy Mohr co-write “All True Man” is another blaster replete with horns. Brooks employs the classic Chicago shuffle in “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,” his fiery guitar soaring above the tight rhythm. Two other standouts in the album’s second half are the mid-tempo, funky “I Got to Make You Mine,” as representative of Brooks’ style as any, buoyed by the background vocalists. The obligatory slow blues “Stuck on Stupid,” a remake of his original, lyrically casts the defiant, scorned male in what is mostly a burning guitar feature.
If this is your introduction to Ronnie Baker Brooks, you’ll hear one of the most infectious, dynamic bluesmen on the scene today. If you’re familiar with him, you’re getting what you expect and maybe a bit more.
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Watch “Blues In My DNA”
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