No nonsense here. The blues have no tolerance for fancy language or extravagant rhythms. This is music in hard focus and precise form, haiku for voice and guitar. "All my love's in vain," Robert Johnson sang, and whenever that feeling comes around to anyone, it is always to a blues accompaniment.
Everyone knows the feeling, but not everyone listens to the music. Blues are too nasty and too raggedy to make it onto the pop charts unpasteurized. B.B. King and Muddy Waters have the names, but Eric Clapton's elegant revisionism makes the hits. For someone who plays and sings the blues as righteously as Robert Cray, it might be expected that he would become just another dimly remembered performer, hunkered down, playing the shellac off old 78s by forgotten Mississippi bands. That is not the way of it, though. In this, and in much else, Robert Cray has a different way about him.
Cray, 33, heard Clapton before he had completed his classical blues curriculum, and the music on his fifth and newest album, Strong Persuader, a collaboration among several songwriters, has the cool and sexy finesse of prime Eric, even as it does the grand masters proud. "I try to keep my ears open to all kinds of things," Cray says, and that receptivity is now paying off. His guitar playing, as precise as a laser beam, and the tormented romanticism of his songs have helped land a major-label record deal and a heavy dose of attention.
Cray sang with Tina Turner for her HBO special, due out this winter, and recently showed up in St. Louis for Chuck Berry's 60th birthday party, a concert extravaganza that featured such luminaries as Keith Richards and Linda Ronstadt and was filmed for theatrical release next year. Cray sang two Berry classics, Come On and Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, and admits, "That was a real kick. But it was also intimidating."
Cray's presence on the bill highlighted his own drift into rock, in abundant evidence on the Strong Persuader album, where the blues give no quarter but are suddenly danceable. "Lyrically," as Cray hears it, "the songs are blues stories in the sense that they relate with lost love, sneakin' around, cheatin' and things like that, but the music isn't traditional blues music. We're stepping out into new territories. Smoking Gun almost sounds like a rock-'n'-roll song." On the album's opening cut, hard-edged guitar and lyrical economy set up another variation on jealousy and revenge: "Maybe you want to end it/ Had your fill of my kind of fun/ But you don't know how to tell me/ And you know I'm not that dumb/I put two and one together,/ And we know that's not an even sum./ And I know just where to catch you with/ That well-known smoking gun."