Biography
Billyblues is:
Mike Norris on harmonica, guitar, & vocals;
Mark Lucas on resonator guitar & vocals;
Colin Raitiere on guitar, bass, & vocals.
The three form an acoustic blues band that takes inspiration from all styles of blues–Piedmont to Delta to Chicago–& also from upper-South traditional music, in which they hear a lot more blues than the people who make categories usually notice.
Old songs are an important part of what they do, and tunes by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie, and Muddy Waters are in their setlists. Original songwriting, however, is a hallmark of the band, whose approach is that the best way to honor a tradition is to contribute to it.
Their sound is strictly wood & steel. It's not Memphis or Morehead; Highway 61 or 80 East; Jackson, Mississippi or Jackson, Kentucky, but a mythical place that you can sometimes hear & even see, but can't send a postcard to; a place created by geography & inclination, luck & longing: where the river meets the mountains.
"Third Shot" is a CD of original acoustic blues music and covers of such classics as John Lee Hooker's "Dimples" and Little Walter's "My Babe". It's especially appealing to listeners who enjoy three-part harmony and instrumentation featuring harmonica, slide guitar, and blues mandolin.
This third recording by BILLYBLUES has been praised for the way different musical genres, from bluegrass to rockabilly, have been woven into the distinctive blues-based sound of the CD.
BILLYBLUES' lyrics have been described as "a cut above" and this CD is no exception. The words, reproduced in the CD booklet, are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes both at the same time. The thematically unified collection of tunes deals with romance and whiskey (not necessarily in that order). The writing features not totally tongue-in-cheek humor ("when your heart's got a real badheadache from getting tore up and destroyed "–Hair of the Dog); memorable phrases ("I'm all up in the air in a funnel cloud of dreams "–Blown Away); and haunting imagery ("I saw my dead father and I shook his dead hand, he gave me a picture of the promised land "–High Winds and Hailstones). Listeners have especially noted the further development of Billyblues ' vocal harmonies. "The voices come across as real," saidone reviewer. "It sounds like I could sing the whole thing, except I couldn't." All three BILLYBLUES members handle lead vocal duties and weave in three-part harmony honed by almost a decade of trio performing. In sum, "Third Shot" should find a receptive audience in blues lovers as well as devotees of more wide-ranging Americana music. As one fan remarked, "BILLYBLUES has its own sound and the songs arecontagious. I find myself humming them at odd times, and then I head back to the CD for another shot of the real thing.
Billyblues: Colin Raitiere, Mark Lucas , Mike Norris.
Additional personnel: Carmel Herde Bowman (fiddle); John Missik (percussion).
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
