I've been anxious to write up Slick's first bona fide cd ever since I saw him playing on Beale Street four years ago during the Handy Awards weekend in Memphis. He stopped people in their tracks then and is still doing it today, except these days there's a lot more people getting exposed to him and his brand of old style, countrified, Mississippi blues. Also, he was only 17 back then and now he's 21. He had a demo at that time and it blew people's minds but he's aged a little, picked up more than a couple new licks and has a regular band to back him as he carries his audience through a world of Sugar Mommas, Bull Cows, Sleeping Dogs, and the Soul that inhabits the Holy Land where Blues began. This album is a testament to that very spirit that is present still, "deep down in the country".

Songs like Brotherhood Blues, Let's Get Down and Juke House Blues, as well as the title track Mississippi Soul, exhort you to get up off your butts and start moving them rather than sitting on them. All are hard driving ass shakers with jackhammer percussion from North Carolina drummer, Leon Baker and the indefatigable Blind Mississippi Morris on harmonica. I've seen Slick and the band go on for half an hour or more in clubs doing this high energy material, never stopping until at least three strings have snapped off his guitar. They kept the versions on the record down to a respectable four or five minutes and somehow finished before breaking anything, that I could hear anyhow. Jim Gaines, who recorded these sessions at his rural Tennessee studio, has captured the raw, electrified passion that this band delivers in the clubs and on the festival circuit.

"You Don't Love Me", Muddy's "Rosalie", "Bull Cow" and "Slow Down" give the listener a chance to catch their breath and grab a cold drink. These are the gutbucket, the lowest of lowdown blues at their finest.

By the way, there is no bassist playing on any of the tracks. And there aren't any zillion note a minute guitar riffs going on either. Just hard driving hooks that will drag you right into the boat and onto the stringer. Slick's blues probably won't sound like any Chicago, West Coast, Texas, or Swing blues that you've been exposed to prior to this. Nope, Slick's blues take you back "Deep down in the country" to the kudzu laden trees and fence rows of Mississippi, to sweltering hot days and nights at picnics, reunions, and house partys out "there"....where things are different and hard and still very goddamned real.

R.Shaw 03.19.06