Review: Barbara Blue ‘From The Shoals’

By Nick Cristiano

The Reigning Queen of Beale Street, Barbara Blue begins her 13th album, From the Shoals, by paying tribute to the locale where it was recorded – Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama, out January 27, 2023, produced by Grammy winner Jim Gaines.

“There’s a powerful magic that shapes the music of the Shoals,” she belts on the punchy, horn-fueled R&B track. She’s alluding to the area’s storied musical history as a place where soul, blues, country, and rock-and-roll came together and where greats from Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett to the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd once recorded. The Pittsburgh native who over the last two and a half decades established herself as “the reigning queen of Beale Street” in another music mecca – Memphis – taps into that magic and creates some of her own, adding to the Shoals’ bountiful legacy.

“I’m gonna sing you my blues,” Blue declares on the 12-bar “NuttHouse Blues,” named for the studio where the set was recorded. And does she ever, backed by a well-pedigreed band that includes such luminaries as drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Muscle Shoals veterans David Hood on bass and Clayton Ivey on keyboards.

Blue matches the gale-force power of Etta James on a scorching, brassy take of “Tell Mama” and reveals a tender, country-soul side on another classic, Jimmy Hughes’ “Steal Away.” But the 11 other songs were written by Blue herself, along with either guitarist Davor Hacic or pianist Mark Narmore. They paint a portrait of a strong-willed, self-aware woman who has taken some shots but refuses to go down.

On the ballad “Too Far,” she sings: “I’ve embraced my scars and just sing my blues. … I know my way and where I’m going.” Even at her most broken-hearted, as on the ballads “Lost Your Love” and “Never Stopped Loving You,” she maintains a steely resilience while expressing her pain, never succumbing to self-pity.

On the gentle “Severed,” Blue makes an open-hearted plea for a fractured society: “We need more kindness. … This hatred gotta come to an end.” And on the deliciously funky “Nothing Lasts Forever,” she dispenses some sage advice while name-checking a soul great: “Like Howard Tate, gotta get it while you can.” She also displays a playful side, echoing Dinah Washington’s “Big Long Sliding Thing” with her own double-entendre R&B workout, “Slide Man” (featuring a slide guitar, not a trombone).

The final number, the hard-hitting blues “Trail of Tears,” brings the album full circle in a way – the Trail of Tears is mentioned in the set-opening “The Shoals.” In writing about that shameful treatment of Native Americans – they considered the Tennessee River that ran through Muscle Shoals a mystical presence, “the singing river” – Blue also gives universal resonance to their struggle as they were displaced: “Losing pride and power, working hard not to lose the fire.”

Blue certainly hasn’t lost any of hers. Of the best music to come out of Muscle Shoals, she sings: “It reaches deep down and grabs you, grabs you by your soul.”

Barbara Blue website