Muddy's Guy

The blues tell only part of the human story, but that part is important. The wages of sin, they imply, is not so much the death of the body (although it is that) as it is the death of faith and of hope and therefore, ultimately, of love.

“Thick Like Mississippi Mud,” Track 12 on Buddy Guy’s latest release, Born to Play Guitar (RCA), traces the blues all the way back to the Garden of Eden. “Man been hurtin,’ Lord,” Guy sings, “since Adam got a hold of Eve.” Biblical references don’t exactly run rampant through Born to Play Guitar, but the ways in which original sin plays itself out does. And Guy explores them like someone who knows whereof he speaks (and sings and plays).

He addresses society at large (“Politicians spend millions / trying to get your vote, / but everybody knows / they’re already bought and sold” [“Crazy World”]). He addresses society at small (“Sit down at a table, / shoot craps all night / like in the good ol’ days, / drink your troubles good bye” [“Whiskey, Beer & Wine”]). And, yes, he addresses the death of the body. (“Come Back Muddy,” Guy’s fervent wish that his former boss and mentor Muddy Waters would return from the dead, concludes the album.)

Mainly, however, it’s Adam and Eve’s blues that Guy understands best, at least insofar as Genesis 3 can be said to contain the impetus of the mutual distrust that fuels the battle of the sexes. In “Too Late,” Guy accuses his woman of “beating” and “cheating.” In “Crying Out of One Eye,” he accuses her of crocodile tears (and more cheating). And in “Back Up Mama,” he proves himself a true son of Adam by blaming his partaking of the forbidden fruit of adultery on her having partaken of it first.

What makes Guy’s mini-dramas compelling is his having taken seriously the promise he made to a dying Muddy Waters 32 years ago that, as one of the last authenticity-era bluesmen standing, he (Guy) would keep the blues alive. Born to Play Guitar is proof that Guy has kept his word. And, as he turned 79 last July, it’s likely that the blues have returned the favor.

Meanwhile, for anyone wanting evidence that Guy was reared a Louisiana Baptist, there’s Guy’s duet with Van Morrison, “Flesh and Bone.” Dedicated to the recently deceased B.B. King, it finds Guy and Morrison grounding their afterlife hopes in their “daddy’s” having “read the Good Book through and through” and concluding that the “Lord’s word is the only truth.”

Morrison and his obsession with transcendent spiritual ecstasy is the subject of the two-disc, 37-track The Essential Van Morrison (Legacy). Instead of merely reshuffling The Best of Van Morrison (1990), The Best of Van Morrison Volume Two (1993), and Still on Top: The Greatest Hits (2007), it adds 17 previously unanthologized cuts to his compilation canon.

Some of them show a judiciousness uncommon among major-label compilers. “The Way Young Lovers Do” makes perfect sense as one of two representatives of the otherwise stand-alone Astral Weeks. The Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast version of “Cleaning Windows” and The Last Waltz version of “Caravan” make their studio counterparts sound almost moribund. And “Tupelo Honey” and “Hungry for Your Love” join “Warm Love” and “Crazy Love” as prime examples of how much sensuous corporeality Morrison can suggest in his quest to incarnate inchoate emotion.

As for the previously anthologized “Whenever God Shines His Light,” it still sounds like one of the greatest gospel songs of all time.