Ray Cashman & Slide man Gabby Brown - Harp man SEE ALSO http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/ray+cashman ot for the faint of heart is Cashman, purveyor of full-frontal downhome blues, as subtle as a tornado funnel or an artillery blast. On Texassippi Stomp, the music arrives courtesy of two guys, Ray Cashman (electric and acoustic guitars, dobro, percussion) and Grant A. Brown (harmonica), with the periodic assistance of the ubiquitous but unfailingly worthy Jimbo Mathus (bass, guitar, snare drum), ...who also produces. This is rude, raucous Mississippi juke-joint music, much less delta than hill country -- the sort of raw approach whose then-surviving (and some since-deceased) native practitioners (including T Model Ford, R.L. Burnside, Paul "Wine" Jones and Robert Belfour) the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum famously recorded and promoted. Among our many debts to Fat Possum (in whose Money Spot studio Cashman cut this album), we may thank it -- snark alert -- for encouraging talented young white guitarists to stop trying to sound like Eric Clapton trying to sound like Albert King. Or, to the more knowledgeable, giving them some idea of a living, as opposed to an archival, country blues. Cashman's uncompromising approach renders trivial, even absurd, conventional notions of "authenticity." Who Cashman and Brown are in prosaic fact -- you could call them, technically, folk musicians in the revival sense -- is detail, and, worse, misleading detail, because in the post-traditional early 21st century anybody who decides to carry a tradition has become a tradition carrier. If the music is so felt and true that it rises above rote impersonation, that's as close to a working definition of "authentic" as you're going to get. Cashman is as authentic as all hell. Jerome Clark Rambles.net Lord knows good bluesmen are hard to come by nowadays. When I first saw these musicians, the voice, the slide guitar, the harp, all of it touched me deep down in my heart where home used to be. It filled a hunger I didnt even realize was there until I heard what they had to offer. Then BOOM! The music was there feeding me. Simply stated, these musicians take me there and back with these blues, and its exactly where I cant help but go. They call it 'Texasippi Blues and its just what its billed a little bit of Texas a little bit of the Mississippi Delta. Its a perfect menu for folks starvin for real music that we have not heard a lot of lately. Something far, far away from the slick, made-up, perfectly coiffed stuff served on radio and T.V. these days that passes for music. Its jumpin. Its downhome and gritty. Its lazy. Its foot foot stompin on a Saturday night. Its barbecue at a blues festival. Its easily all of that in one sitting. This music is not crowded with a lot of extraneous instrumentation or fancy musical trickery. Its just Ray Cashman & Gabby Brown, simple and to the point, giving a longstanding art new life. Yet, theres plenty there that harkens back to the past; something rising up from the ashes upon which popular opinion burned its bridges long ago. It touches you even when youre not expecting it and opens up a forgotten avenue, a refurbished alley, a revamped highway. A new old place to go. Its songs you know they lived out somewhere along the line. You can tell nobody had to write their songs for them their songs ARE them. Lyndia T. Day Austin, Texas SEE ALSO: http://www.last.fm/music/ray+cashman http://www.reverbnation.com/cashman http://www.facebook.com//RayCashmanMusic MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/raycashman