Blues and roots veteran
Eric Bibb follows 2021's provocative and profound
Dear America with
Ridin', a continuation of many of its themes and topics. The Stockholm-based musician revisits in song the activism of the Civil Rights movement and the ongoing struggle for equality, current events, and personal experiences. Its ethos was inspired by painter
Eastman Johnson's 1862 painting "A Ride for Liberty," depicting a Black family fleeing slavery during the American Civil War.
Bibb was inspired by the "hope, determination and courage in the work that is at the core of the African American experience and needed now throughout the world." Produced and mixed by
Glen Scott,
Bibb enlisted friends including bluesmen
Taj Mahal,
Jontavious Willis, jazz guitarist
Russell Malone, African guitarist/vocalist
Habib Koite, and kora master
Lamine Cissokho, among others.
"Family" is a banjo-, snare-, and organ-driven intro that introduces the album's overarching theme: "I am like you/You are like me," in call-and-response with a gospel choir. It's haunted and haunting;
Bibb knows there should be no need to state the obvious. The title track is a rolling, electric Delta choogler that recalls the swampy blues of
RL Burnside about riding on the metaphorical freedom train, as
Bibb bridges the Civil Rights era with the continued racial strife and oppression of the 2000s underscored by a searing slide guitar solo atop the boogie.
Mahal and
Willis aid on the stomping rural roots of "Blues Funky Like Dat." While it deviates topically, its gutbucket back porch groove underscores the album's theme. The union of the three men's voices improvising and affirming
Bibb adds force and authority. Jazz guitarist
Malone makes his first appearance on "The Ballad of John Howard Griffin." Its subject was the author of the historic "Black Like Me," a journalistic account of a white man who underwent medical procedures to live as a Black man in the South. Rhythmically driven by fingersnaps, acoustic and electric guitars swing in dialogue;
Bibb relates his tale accompanied by a doo wop choir. "Tulsa Town" is a hypnotic country-blues that relates the harrowing story of the city's 1921 racial massacre on Greenwood Avenue, the home of Oklahoma's "Black Wall St," by jealous whites.
Bibb is joined by
Harrison Kennedy on "Call Me by My Name," an original that recounts the abundant contributions Black people have made to core American history across the centuries and a refusal to be acknowledged for anything less. "Free" weds a gospel chorus to twinned lead vocals by
Bibb and
Koite amid skilled interplay between the guitarists and
Cissokho's sparkling kora. "People You Love" is a country song complete with pedal steel, a lilting melody, and poetic lyrics; it's one of the most incisive songs
Bibb has ever composed.
Ridin' is prescient in equating history's achievements, tragedies, and struggles with those occurring in the 21st century, buoyed by a sublime musical palette of blues, folk, and Americana that matches and amplifies its profound lyric themes and stories. ~ Thom Jurek
