Blackgrass by Swamp Dogg
About 53 years before Jason Aldean and George Strait offered their largely useless opinions about Beyoncé’s venture into country music, Jerry Williams Jr.—also known as Swamp Dogg—notched a number-two country hit with Johnny Paycheck’s version of “She’s All I Got,” which Williams and Gary Bonds had co-written.
That commercial credential makes Swamp Dogg’s latest album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, less an African American claim to C&W than a wry assertion that the territory isn’t segregated.
Wry, and at times deeply silly: Blackgrass opens with “Mess Under That Dress,” a fast-picking breakdown that describes said “mess” as something so good that a preacher, a doctor and an undertaker all attest to its filthy powers, and the next track, “Ugly Man’s Wife,” promises luxuries and uxorious adoration to any woman who can look past a clock-stopping face.
The goofiness can be expected from the guy whose second R&B album as Swamp Dogg was 1971’s Rat On!, featuring legendarily terrible cover art, but his voice is as raspy and earnest when praising poontang as it is when, in the dusty slow sway of “This Is My Dream,” admitting to his dream lover, “You’ll be in my heart always/If it’s just to make me blue.”
And the musicianship is stellar: Punch Brothers banjoist Noam Pikelny and wide-ranging violinist Billy Contreras are among the dexterous members of the backing band. Living Colour’s Vernon Reid mauls his guitar to bring the riot to “Rise Up,” while Americana women Margo Price and Jenny Lewis become hillbilly sirens for Bonds and Williams’s “To the Other Woman” and the breezy Gene Pitney favorite “Count the Days,” respectively.
Williams is 81, but he’s not leaning on that age as if it’s a cane. Instead, it’s the authority behind the Swamp Dogg persona, which is far from retiring on Blackgrass.
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Get Blackgrass at Amazon here.
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