Black Joe Lewis
Tell 'Em What Your Name Is!
Lost Highway
By Jose Fritz
After a decade of shitty disco and jam bands, modem funk often eschews the guitar for a big horn section. This is a complete rebuke of what made James Brown the king of hard funk. The bulk of acts today touring with a full horn section are white-bread jam bands, as juiced up on hash as they are salsa, shrooms and endless soft-core noodling. Black Joe Lewis gives them the finger. Songs like “Get Yo Shit” continue this self-aware streak while also emulating the hip-hop skit tradition. It’s comedic and fun but still hard and funky.
But the whole of the record is not skits and giggles nor retro funk. “Master Sold My Baby” wades into the school of electric fuzz-blues. The song is built atop a drumroll and a march like the ancient fife-and-drum tradition. The result is something I’d expect more from the North Mississippi Allstars. Black Joe Lewis and the Honey Bears is a product of the long-standing Texas hard funk tradition. A few years back Jazzman Records released a compilation simply called Texas Funk. It was a cold hard funk masterpiece. Black Joe Lewis is not a hack James Brown rip-off. It’s an homage to this indigenous Texas funk: gut-bucket riffing; the chicken-fried classic brand of hard funk
Lewis shouts, croons, yelps, hollers and careens around the song. He embraces the original call-and-response funk maneuver patented by James Brown in the 1950s. It goes like this:
Y’all with me? – Yeah!
Y’all with me? – Yeah!
Y’all ready? – Yeah!
The rhythm continues through out the exchange and the horns take five. In the verse the horn section lays down a syncopated blast for each affirmative response. In the Lewis version the blasts break in during the successive verse but the idea is the same. Brown didn’t need to confer with The Famous Flames or The Soul Generals verbally. The whole show was heavily rehearsed, and all onstage changes were indicated by subtle hand signals. The call and response routine was a part of the song, always was. Lewis knows that and works it right into the bit.
James Brown is dead. It’s an incontrovertible fact. The godfather of soul died at 1:45 PM Eastern Standard Time on December 25th, Christmas Day of the year 2006. He groomed no successor. While he spawned 5 sons and a daughter he passed the chalice to no one. And why should he? Brown was the hardest working man in show business. If you want to usurp soul brother number one you’re going to have to come and get it yourself. Let it be known that Black Joe Lewis has stepped up.
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