Toronto Blues Society | » Young Blood

Young Blood

Published July 1, 1997 in Features
Corey Harris

Alligator Recording artist Corey Harris appears as part of Heinekin Soul ‘n’ Blues on Sunday July 20 at 2pm on the Molson Place Stage. He’s decided to use his degree in anthropology to apply the blues tradition of his ancestors to the problems of today.


Heinekin Soul ‘n’ Blues this month features four young African-Americans who play blues, who have decided to explore that part of their heritage regardless of the distance, in time or space, from their ancestors:

David Kimbrough was born in Holly Springs, Miss. in 1965 and started singing blues early. His Dad, Jr. Kimbrough, used to bring him to his famous juke and get him to up when he was 6. David Jr. was well rewarded with tips which his father kept ‘for him’! His parents separated when he was 12 and he decided to take the name Malone. His career continued through various bands and incredibly was not derailed when he went to the infamous Parchman Farm for 5 years-he joined the prison band! It was while in prison that he came to the attention of Fat Possum Records in Oxford, Miss. and I Got The Dog In Me was recorded as by David Malone & The Sugar Bears while he was on parole. Not many copies of the CD were sold however, and he has higher hopes for his new Midnight Creeper CD Dog Affair. He and his brother also recently decided to go back to using Kimbrough. “I wanted to take my chances on my biological name.” He calls his music ‘popnotic’ by which he acknowledges some pop music influence(especially Prince), not to mention his ‘Pop’ whose hypnotic, drone sound is also in the mix, “and it’s got the beat, then it’s got that old saying-you might hear that old poetic words…you’re liable to hear anything, from country and western all the way up to jazz…it’s fusion music for the year 2000.”(With thanks to Living Blues #132 and David Nelson)

Gregory E. ‘Alvin Youngblood’ Hart was born in Oakland, CA in 1963 and spent his childhood in nearby Hayward. Television contributed the ‘Alvin'(from The Chipmunks) and ‘Joe Friday’ to his CD Big Mama’s Door and the family had some Jimmy Reed and B.B. King records that he heard but it was his visits to his grandmother in Carrolton, Miss. in the hill country east of Greenwood that sparked the interest. (She’s the Big Mama). ‘Youngblood’ was the name given to him by the regulars on Maxwell Street in Chicago: he and his family had moved around quite a bit while he was a teenager and in the time it took to adjust to new schools and friends, he had a lot of time to play guitar, they settled for at tme in Schaumberg, IL giving him the opportunity to visit relatives in Chicago and busk on Maxwell. While continually learning more about blues, he became turned off by the music business and ended up in the Coast Guard based in Natchez, Miss. for almost 4 years. After stints in New York and San Reyes, CA, he was discharged in 1993. His big break came in February ’95 when he opened for Taj Mahal in Oakland and was invited to a jam session whose purpose was to work up material for a musical theater collaboration about baseball legend Satchel Paige. He connected with Taj Mahal’s manager Carey Williams and writer Michael Nash and they were able to land Hart a contract with the re-activated Okeh label, home of Keb’ Mo’. Alvin Youngblood Hart was last here as part of the Folk Alliance Show and Conference last February.

Guy Davis was born in Manhattan to the celebrated actor/directors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in 1952. When he first heard blues as a child, he thought it was something invented by white college guys because that’s who was playing it. Hearing Taj Mahal made him appreciate and enjoy the music far more and he began to study it seriously, beginning with folk music styles and Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell before moving on to the Delta styles. What sets his performances apart from others is his background in theatre-his use of comedy and storytelling. He’s written and performed in blues-oriented plays(In Bed With The Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters) and in productions written by his mother. His first album was for Moses Asch‘s Folkways label and he now has 2 on Red House, the live Stomp Down Rider and Calling Down The Thunder. In the liner notes to that last one he writes: “The Blues was here long before I arrived, and it’s gonna still be here long after I’m gone. The best I can do is try to say the same old thing in a new way. Sometimes the Blues can kick your butt so hard, your teeth’ll fall out. Sometimes it’s real quiet and just lingers in the room with you….always, the Blues stirs my soul.”

Corey Harris was born in 1969 and grew up in Denver, Colorado. He was musically inclined and enjoyed all kinds of music, playing guitar in rock bands in high school but always liking blues. His mother was from Texas and introduced him to the music of Lightning Hopkins. After college in Maine, he decided to study languages, particularly Pidgin, a patois of English, Portugese, and several different local languages in Cameroon in Africa. He took his new resonator guitar with him along with records of Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines and Son House. Upon his return, he taught school in rural Louisiana and played the streets of New Orleans. His 2nd Alligator CD, Fish Ain’t Bitin’ in fact, features brass band players on four of the songs. The title track details how the Mississippi, in Louisiana, had become ‘Cancer Alley’, an industrial region where the rate of cancer deaths has gone through the roof. “For generations the river was the people’s lifeline; now it’s their poison. Blues commands me to sing about the changing times, to bear witness to what’s happening now, to educate others through the tradition.”

– John Valenteyn

Donate Join TBS Volunteer

©2024 Toronto Blues Society. Design by Janine Stoll Media.
TBS logo and WBR artwork by Barbara Klunder


The Toronto Blues Society acknowledges the annual support of the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage, and project support from FACTOR< and the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage (Canada Music Fund) and of Canada’s Private Broadcasters, The Canada Council for the Arts, the SOCAN Foundation, SOCAN, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport.