Taj Mahal, The Natch'l Blues - 36m 39s

Tracks & Durations

1. Good Morning Miss Brown	3:17
2. Corinna	3:03
3. I Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Steal My Jellyroll	3:15
4. Going Up To The Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue	3:38
5. Done Changed My Way Of Living	7:06
6. She Caught The Katy And left Me A Mule To Ride	3:30
7. The Cuckoo	4:16
8. You Don't Miss Your Water ('Till Your Well Runs Dry)	4:26
9. A Lot Of Love	3:59

Note: The information about this album is acquired from the publicly available resources and we are not responsible for their accuracy.

Review

Taj Mahal's been chasing the blues around the world for years, but rarely with the passion, energy, and clarity he brought to his first three albums. Taj Mahal, The Natch'l Blues and The Real Thing are the sound of the artist, who was born in 1942, defining himself and his music. On his self-titled 1967 debut, he not only honors the sound of the Delta masters with his driving National steel guitar and hard vocal shout, but ladles in elements of rock and country with the help of guitarists Ry Cooder and the late Jessie Ed Davis. This approach is reinforced and broadened by The Natch'l Blues. What's most striking is Mahal's way of making even the oldest themes sound as if they're part of a new era. Not just through the vigor of his playing--relentlessly propulsive, yet stripped down compared with the six-string ornamentations of the original masters of country blues--but through his singing, which possesses a knowing insouciance distinct to post-Woodstock counterculture hipsters. It's the voice of an informed young man who knows he's offering something deep to an equally hip and receptive audience.

Soon, Mahal turned his multicultural vision of the blues even further outward. The live 1971 set, The Real Thing, finds him still carrying the Mississippi torch, while adding overt elements of jazz and Afro-Caribbean music to its flame. But it's overreaching. His band sounds under-rehearsed, and the arrangements seem more like rough outlines. Nonetheless, these albums set the stage for Mahal's career. (For a condensed version, try the fine The Best of Taj Mahal.) Today, he continues to make fine fusion albums, like 1999's Kulanjan, with Malian kora master Toumani Diabate, and less exciting but still eclectic recordings with his Phantom Blues Band. --Ted Drozdowski

Other Versions

Albums are mined from the various public resources and can be actually the same but different in the tracks length only. We are keeping all versions now.

The Natch'l Blues

Tracks: 9, Disk length: 36m 29s (-1m 50s)

The Natch'l Blues

Tracks: 12 (+3 tracks), Disk length: 49m 5s (+12m 26s)

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