How great would it be if one day that age-old “when I was your age” wisdom imparted to a youngster didn’t fall on deaf ears?
What if, instead, it found immensely talented ears and morphed into a modern take on classic blues guitar rock?
It has.
Guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd is 29 years old, but he has an old soul when it comes to laying down blues guitar riffs and carrying on a decades-old legacy in music for a new generation.
With his latest project, “10 Days Out: Blues From the Backroads,” Shepherd is hammering home his love for the music and chronicling it for the ages. With two Grammy nominations and a pair of platinum albums out of his already 10-year-old career, Shepherd decided to do his part for the music.
The Shreveport, La., native ventured into the heartland of blues music, taking an all-star band that included Stevie Ray Vaughn’s group, Double Trouble, along for the ride in a bus that started in New Orleans and Shreveport before heading into Alabama to the Carolinas and back west to Kansas, where he met and recorded with some of the best and brightest in blues.
Some of his collaborators you might have heard of – B.B. King and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown among them – and some you might not have, such as Cootie Stark, Neal Pattman and Etta Baker.
But the journey wasn’t about dropping names. It was about melding Shepherd’s youthful take with the perspective and wisdom of other greats, and capturing it all on a CD and filmed documentary by the same title.
“We could have stopped in every city in the U.S.,” Shepherd said in press materials, “and we’d find somebody – whether an old cat who is an original product of this music, or else a kid my age or younger – but we’d have found someone who is a fan of the blues and trying to do it justice.
“We could lay out a world map, throw a dart and go there to play blues – and people are gonna love it.”
Tonight, Shepherd brings his “Blues From the Backroads Legends Tour” to The Showbox. The show will feature collaborators Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Bryan Lee and Buddy Flett.
A portion of the proceeds from the project will be donated to the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on helping the pioneers and “forgotten heroes” of Southern musical traditions gain recognition and meet their day-to-day needs.
Since the recording and filming was completed, six of Shepherd’s collaborators – Henry Townsend, Wild Child Butler, Brown, Stark, Pattman and Baker – have died, giving further credence to the kind of history being preserved in “10 Days Out.”
“These guys are pulling on heartstrings, you know what I mean?” Shepherd says in the film.
“I mean, a lot of these guys may not be with us much longer. But that’s one of the reasons I think it was so important for us to capture all of this and to document it with music. So people can hear it and see it.”
Reprise Records photo
Kenny Wayne Shepherd performs tonight at The Showbox in Seattle.
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