[Harp-L] Sugar Ray and Pinetop

["steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <swebb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A friend of mine was recently in Austin, Texas and ran across Pinetop Perkins in a club there. He bought a CD from him that has some great harp music on there by Sugar Ray. The whole CD, in fact, is great old blues. Sugar Ray's playing has none of the fast, flashy stuff... it's just the blues the way the blues are supposed to be played. I'm sitting here right now listening to it and it's just great.
I've been playing harp in a trio since last Sept., mostly country-styled and some rock, all acoustic stuff , and I haven't listened to much blues. We are taking the summer off from the trio and I hope to play some bluegrass and maybe some blues. I played last Sat. nite with a local blues band on upright bass, which was a first for me. They let me sit in at a small club with an even smaller audience and I just tried to pick it up as I went along. Since I hadn't played bass for months, I wasn't expecting much, but it wasn't too bad. I really wanted to grab a harp, though. The leader of the group is a harp player. His playing is effective, but not very technically sound. 
Anyhow, back to Pinetop. The CD is called Back on Top and it's good.
Steve Webb in balmy Minnesota where the high today was 79...