Poplar Jake
Album: From The Delta To The Docks
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.poplarjake.com

Having recently been listening to a number of the pre-war blues guys as well as artists like Bob Meyer that have been heavily influenced by them, I was really intrigued when an album called "From The Delta To The Dock" showed up in my mailbox, by an artist called Poplar Jake. A lot of the albums in my collection with the word Delta in the title are either reissues of recordings from that between the war era or compilations of artists recording at the time.

I wasn't disappointed, the sound that came out of the speakers was exactly the pre-war blues sound and my first thought was that Poplar Jake was one of those old blues guys that had somehow managed to pass me by. It took me about thirty seconds more, reading the sleeve notes to discover that he's actually an artist of the here and now, albeit one that seems to be living in the past. Not only that the guy is British.

"From The Delta To The Dock" is a journey album, one that combines a personal journey with one of the music that is carrying the stories. On the album you can feel the early days of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and more importantly you can also feel the sound of the days just before the music started to transmute into rock 'n' roll as it found it's ways into the big cities and their docklands as blues followed the work. Somehow you get the feeling that Poplar Jake has livid it, even though you know he hasn't.

Poplar Jake hasn't gone out to fake the sound, this is very much an homage. This is not a tribute album to one of those old bluesmen, this is an album of Poplar Jake playing pre-war blues and he makes a decent shot of it. You can feel a real excitement in what he's doing. His sound covers a dozen or so years of the music, at one end capturing the likes of Mississippi John Hurt at the other the sounds of early Jerry Lee Lewis. "From The Delta To The Dock" is quite a journey and one that I would encourage you to take.

Neil King