Erin Harpe And The Delta Swingers recently competed in the International Blues Competition in Memphis, and they just got back from a gig at South By Southwest Music Conference And Festival in Austin. Harpe and her Delta Swingers are a Boston-based blues band who play authentic renditions of the old time sounding vintage blues from the 1920 and the 1930s. Their show last night at Boston’s Smoken’ Joe’s BBQ and Blues found them in top form.
Boy, this band is a real treat for fans of serious vintage blues. The purists will always dig the vintage guitar and harp sounds from the 1920 and 1930s. They will also love the big stomp in the rhythm section. There was just so much for a blues historian to sink his teeth into. The harp is fulsome and played with a lot of historical knowledge of this great American music.
The first half hour of last night’s show was dedicated to duets between by Harpe and her harp player Richard “Rosy” Rosenblatt. It was cool how Rosenblatt’s flying notes circled around Harpe’s nimble, mellow picking style. Harpe really knows how to play those vintage blues songs from the early days of this respected American genre.
Each of Harpe’s notes seemed to echo old time colors and tones. Her picking style can make you picture a poor southern family gathered on their front porch mid-summer playing and singing of their troubles in their time. Her melodies are almost hypnotic in that they can lull you with their subtle interplay of strikingly sharp colors.
Moreover, Harpe’s has an incredibly vibrant voice for crooning these nuggets from yesteryear. Her voice holds a niche between silky and raspy, flowing smoothly with just the right touch of edge. This showed in tunes like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out,” in which she pushed her verses with elegant grace around her rhythmic guitar melodies.
Harpe’s picking got crisper and Rosenblatt’s harmonica got chirpier on “You’re Gonna Quit Me,” showing their control of dynamics and style. Harpe manufactured on her guitar the low end notes and her higher melodic ones simultaneously. Her voice got wider and her timbre expanded, and the full vibrant sound the two conjured whetted the appetite to hear what the full band would eventually do.
Harpe introduced Memphis Minnie’s “In My Girlish Days” and put a little extra pizzazz into her picking, taking those old time notes for a walk around the block before returning them back home again. Her vocal was more assertive here, too, bringing out that Memphis Minnie attitude. Her take on Bessie Smith’s “Take It Right Back” sounded like country blues guitar, guitar subbing for the piano on the original, and she nailed how Smith stretched vocal notes and spun the lyrics around the supposed beat.
Harpe and Rosenblatt were then joined by bass player Juicy Jim Countryman and drummer Bob Nisi, and The Delta Swingers showed that they have earned their name. They moved each song forward with a breezy, grand grace that made you feel the moving steel parts in this rhythm section. On “Bye Bye Blues” Rosenblatt whipped up an extra dose of power when he cupped his microphone to his harp. The three players forced Harpe to step up her game, making her more expressive at the mic and in her picking approach. Her voice got sharper and her vintage guitar styles took on a larger, wider angle in the songs.
Her own “Charles River Delta Blues” found her and her boys taking it down to Mississippi. The rhythm section gave it a heavy two-step feel while Rosenblatt took it up high with a melody line that stabbed into the groove. Harpe found the right spaces in the song to assert her twangy blues notes and her harmony with Nisi, who is also a backing vocalist, gave each chorus some lift, making you picture the wings of the song catching an air current and taking off.
Harpe’s picking style often, on slow tempo material, tugged the song forward with sharp, melodic notes. She and her boys were doing something right last night. Their popular rendition of vintage blues tunes proved popular with the crowd who had packed Smoken’ Joe’s. When Harped sang in a hint of drawl voice, her vocal melody got the needed muscle to politely glide over a knobby beat.
Harpe had fun with “Chauffer” by throwing some twangs in, making it sound punchy. She and her Delta Swingers turned John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” into a stomping two-step complete with harmonica blasts and crisp guitar notes that made you picture blues out on the range.
Harpe held her vocal notes in the air on Lonnie Johnson’s “Winner The Wailer,” breathing blues into them while Rosenblatt blew a wide circular melody that conjured up the enormous sea.
The second set showed Harpe and her Delta boys pumping out a danceable beat underneath Rosenblatt’s serious harp on “Virtual Booty Blues.” The group got many people on their feet with a Delta swing. An original Harpe tune called “LoveWhip Blues” was how, according to Harpe, how Memphis Minnie would have interpreted the name of her other band LoveWhip. The tune was marked by Rosenblatt’s whirling dervish of happy harp notes.
“Sitting And Watching” featured an interesting harp line that skipped along on a joyful beat and “Stop And Listen” was a country two-step with frenetic pacing that brought a lot of people to their feet.
Erin Harpe And The Delta Swingers definitely control and channel vintage blues. Blues purists will likely always welcome them, and just about anybody who likes a good time will enjoy seeing them perform. You don’t even have to be a fan of their style of music to have fun at their shows.