Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie Mcghee

This album certainly has deep roots. The original Get on Board by the folk-blues duo of harmonica player Sonny Terry and guitarist Brownie McGhee was a ten-inch album released on Folkways in 1952. By the mid-60s, Cooder and Taj Mahal were playing together in blues band the Rising Sons before both embarked on long and diverse solo careers. Cooder and Taj both heard Terry and McGhee in the folk clubs as teenagers and here the young ‘kids’ pay homage to the old-timers’ songbook. They’ve known songs such as ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’, ‘The Midnight Special’ and ‘Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ all their working lives and invest them here with a profound love and respect. Recorded in just three days with Taj Mahal on harp and Cooder on guitar, mandolin and grainy vocals, plus son Joachim Cooder on percussion, the sound is earthy and the production stripped back so that at times it sounds like an impromptu jam in a shotgun shack back in the day. The execution is as masterful as you would expect from two such learned scholars of American vernacular music and it’s a pleasure to hear these old songs again played with such robust joy.