Far from the smoky city clubs where electric blues grew up, some of the best blues is now heard at outdoor summer festivals. The Lucerne Blues Festival in Switzerland is one of the best, and German label CrossCut Records captured many intense sets of lesser-known but serious blues bands in the summer of 2001. They have released several CDs, with more to come, but the latest in the series, "Roy Gaines In the House," features the gutbucket Texas blues of Houston singer-guitarist Roy Gaines.
Gaines has been playing as sideman to innovators of southern-style blues since the 1950s. After starting out as second guitar behind T-Bone Walker, Gaines added his fast-flowing guitar style to Jimmy Rushing's late '50s sessions, which still rank as landmarks of blues-based jazz. From the '60s to the '90s, Gaines backed up such notables as Little Milton, Chuck Willis and Bobby Blue Bland, picking up bits and pieces of their divergent styles and blending them into his own high-voltage repertoire.
On his songs, Gaines sticks to love, work and pain. On "Standing up for Women's Rights," he's for women's liberation, but for his own selfish reasons, not least of which is to outlaw his woman's "giving away her love to someone new." On "Too Many Men," he sings, "She ain't no Rolls Royce/She sure ain't no Expedition Ford/She got the shape all right/But she can't carry no heavy load."