A second-generation blues artist, singer Shemekia Copeland has slipped out from under the long shadow of her legendary father, blues guitarist Johnny Copeland, to quietly put together an impressive career on the strength of her enormous voice and songwriting skills.
With Never Going Back, her fifth studio album, and her first for Telarc Records, Copeland lays claim to a rich blues and soul heritage. Challenging herself and her talents with a wide variety of styles and performances, Never Going Back sets a high standard by which Copeland's future work will be measured.
Shemekia Copeland's Never Going Back
Soaring atop a steady groove and a lonely drumbeat, Copeland's powerful voice infuses "Sounds Like The Devil" with a soulful dignity. A working-class blues song with feverish guitarwork and church-choir keyboards, Copeland's lyrics take aim at the politicians and preachers that seem to do little but keep people in their thrall.
With rattling electric fretwork and sparse rhythms, "Dirty Water" starts out as a swamp-blues dirge that highlight's Copeland's mournful vocals. Half-way through and the band kicks in, staggered instrumentation and wiry guitar mixed high alongside the singer's transcendent vocals, creating a magnificent tension that drives the song to an inelegant conclusion, its lyrics a clever analogy for the lies and betrayal at the heart of the tale.
Never Going Back To Memphis
The wonderfully wry "Never Going Back To Memphis" begins with a sly-footed calypso rhythm and dark, quiet guitar layered in beneath Copeland's tale of death and denial in the Bluff City. The song commands one of Copeland's better vocal performances; stripped of all but its Orbisonesque trembling guitarplay and a shuffling rhythm, the singer's voice rises and falls in line with the passion of the lyrics.
An inspired cover of Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow" is built on a subtle framework of a loping bassline and a mean groove, Copeland's quiet vocals interrupted by dashes of keyboards. It sounds like something you'd hear wafting out of the back door of a Manhattan jazz club after-midnight, when the citizens have long fled for home and only the true believers remain. It's perhaps the nuanced song on Never Going Back, but it's also one of the album's most effective and affecting performances.
Stax Soul
By comparison, the defiant "Born A Penny," which follows "Black Crow" in the album's sequence, is a brassy, big-beat soul-blaster in a Memphis/Stax vein. A funky rhythm and Booker T-styled keyboards ride beneath the gospel fervor of Copeland's joyous vocals, the song itself a morality tale of humility over greed and patience over reckless ambition.
"Big Brand New Religion" is a gospel-blues raver with a rambling beat and fervent Sunday pulpit vocals that are complimented by twangy guitar and shambling rockabilly rhythms. Perhaps the bluesiest of all the songs on the album, Copeland's "Circumstances" closes out Never Going Back with its lyrics of malevolent powers heaping economic and romantic woes upon the tragic figure at the center of the song's story. Accompanied by some Delta-inspired snaky guitarplay, Copeland's assured vocals echo the pain of thousands of lost souls.
The Reverend's Bottom Line
The first time that you hear Shemekia Copeland's voice, you're certain to stop dead in your tracks. An old-school blues wailer in the vein of Etta James or Koko Taylor, Copeland's vocal toolbox includes the complexity of 1970s soul and the subtle influences of 50 years of recorded blues music. Quite simply, Copeland is one of the very best vocalists on the road and in the studio these days.
Copeland's Never Going Back takes full advantage of the singer's talents, the album's performances ranging from Chicago-style blues, R&B, and soul to material which borderlines on rock music. Throughout it all, Copeland delivers the real goods, her expansive vocals equally capable of both a sexy whisper and a threatening growl, sometimes within the range of the same song. Never Going Back is a fine showcase for Copeland, and solid work of soulful elegance and blues excellence. (Telarc Records, released February 24, 2009)
