Delta Kream: The Black Keys and the Blues Behind the Album

I have been a longtime fan of The Black Keys, first discovering their album Thickfreakness and then following subsequent releases off and on through high school and college. I caught my first Keys show in Atlanta in 2014, and they have been one of my favorite bands ever since.

After graduating college I joined a teacher placement program and found myself in summer teacher training in the Mississippi Delta - the birthplace of the blues. I was instantly hooked. Songs such as Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues" and David Honeyboy Edwards' "Blues Worry Me All The Time" were the perfect musical backdrop to a hot, humid Delta summer where I taught in a Cleveland classroom by day and drove endless backroads by night, the perfectly flat landscape and breathtaking, star-filled horizon as alien to me as another planet.

After completing my summer training, I was sent to teach in northeastern Mississippi - the Hill Country. Different geographically, topographically, and culturally from the more infamous Delta, the Hill Country has a musical history that's totally unique and one that I was only too excited to discover after my dad (a big music history guru himself) told me that one of my favorite bands was hugely influenced by some of the blues musicians who hailed from my new home. I immediately started researching and ordered The Black Keys' Chulahoma from Amazon. This is an album of Hill Country bluesman Junior Kimbrough cover songs, and when I finally got my hands on it, I was totally blown away.

Now, I am no music critic. My background is in English Literature and Education. But what I knew when I listened to this album for the first time is that it immediately struck a cord in me. From the slide guitar to the raw lyrics, I felt that I had landed on something special, a Keys album that I had only rarely heard other fans discuss. In the album's inner sleeve, Dan Auerbach wrote:

This is gonna be a short recollection of the day I was transformed. And I'll start at the beginning but not when I was born. I was 18 years old. There was a black and white photo on the front cover. It was of an old man seated by a jukebox. He was playing an electric guitar while some women, frozen in time, swayed to the music he seemed to be making...There, alone in my room, I was transformed...Nature, humanity, my feet on the floor, the fake wood laminated desktop, the moon and stars, the heat from my body, my reflection in the mirror, my whole existence was flipped on its head and back around twice...the walls came tumbling down and the earth shook when I locked into Junior's groove. I'll be forever grateful, forever in awe, and forever indebted to Junior Kimbrough.

Though I am not a musician myself, the words I read on this inner sleeve resonated after I listened to the album and I knew I wanted to learn as much about Junior Kimbrough and the other Blues players who created some of the most unique music on planet Earth right there in the little town I had just happened to be placed in...Holly Springs, Mississippi. I listened to the album Auerbach referenced (Most Things Haven't Worked Out) right away, and from that point on, I began to consume as much hill country blues as I could get my hands on.

Origins of Hill Country Blues

According to the Mississippi Blues Trail website, hill country blues is a genre of blues music is "characterized by few chord changes, unconventional song structures, and an emphasis on the 'groove' or a steady, driving rhythm." While there have been many hill country blues players such as Othar Turner and Jessie Mae Hemphill, the two most famous are the above-named Junior Kimbrough and another favorite of mine, R.L. Burnside. The Black Keys have cited both artists as major influencers of their work.

Hill country artists seemed to have mostly played locally in juke joints like Junior's Place in the video clips below, and for family and friends outside of a few forays into recording singles or songs until the 1990s, when Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside (who were neighbors and close friends) began recording more frequently with major record labels and touring internationally.

RL Burnside Performs at Junior's Place:

Junior Kimbrough Performs at his place:

Both artists saw a lot of popular, if not financial, success in their final heyday, and if you watch the videos, it's easy to see why. Though Kimbrough's blues are often regarded as having a darker edge to them, both artists play music that can only be described as hypnotic. The nineties saw them wildly popular with a new generation of music lovers. Burnside even recorded an album near Holly Springs with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a bluesy punk band. The resulting album (Ass Pocket of Whiskey), punctuated by bawdy stories and cursing, screams, and bits of conversation, is still incredibly polarizing among blues fanatics today. You have people like me, who think it is probably a work of genius, and then others who lean more towards blues purism who dislike the album on premise alone.

Junior Kimbrough died of a heart attack and stroke in 1998, and R.L. Burnside followed in 2005. When I learned that neither artist was living, I was disappointed that I would never get to hear them play their amazing music in person. Lyrics from songs like Burnside's "Have You Ever Been Lonely?" and Kimbrough's version of "Done Got Old?" got me through some difficult days teaching middle school, living far away from my family. Even though my life experience was so different from that of these blues greats, their music spoke to me in a way that little else did at that time.

Hill Country Blues Live On

When one of my good friends from college visited in 2016, I was asking my coworkers for recommendations of things to do around the Oxford, Mississippi area. One coworker told me about a show that the Cedric Burnside Project, composed at that time of R.L's grandson Cedric Burnside and Trenton Ayers (son of Hill Country guitar legend Little Joe Ayers), would play that week at a restaurant and bar called Proud Larry's. We bought tickets. I was familiar with Cedric Burnside of course, knowing that he had played the drums often with his grandfather, but I wasn't sure what to expect. I hoped for a show with the same driving, frantic electric blues I had come to love. Needless to say, I was not disappointed.

The Cedric Burnside Project plays at Proud Larry's:

The show had guests of every stripe in attendance: casual blues fans like my husband and I, interested newcomers like my friend, people who were there to patron the restaurant, fraternity brothers looking for something to do on a Thursday night, and Cedric Burnside's enthusiastic fanbase, the people crowding in the front row right in front of the stage who probably don't miss a show. Black and white, young and old, hungry diner and rabid Burnside fan, something amazing happened as Cedric and Trenton started to warm up for their set.

People started to get out of their seats and move towards the stage. We pressed in close together, breathless as the two bluesman played their practice notes. By the time the lights dimmed and they began their set, the air felt electric and the audience, no matter who they had been before that show started or why they had come, were up out of their seats and grooving along to Cedric's berserk, but extraordinarily talented, drumming style as Trenton Ayers handily played guitar. It was the best show I had ever seen, and to this day remains the best show I have ever seen. I had heard the blues described as a religious experience, and after witnessing the sons of living legends cover their songs in person, I understood.

Worldwide fans of The Black Keys may not realize just how many people who grew up in Mississippi's hill country are still playing this kind of music today, and with the same prowess you would expect to fill large venues and concert halls. Cedric Burnside has since become a solo artist and will release his second album, I Be Trying, next month. Other artists that come to mind are North Mississippi Allstars, Kenny Brown, Robert Kimbrough Sr., Eric Deaton, and Lightnin Malcolm. Anyone who loves the bluesy offerings of The Keys will do well to check out some of the talented hill country bluesman who also draw on Kimbrough and Burnside's body of work.

Delta Kream

Given my roundabout journey from the music of The Black Keys to Mississippi to the original hill country blues, I was incredibly excited to listen to The Keys' new album Delta Kream. Their music video for one of the first singles off the album, a cover of Burnside's "Going Down South," features video from Holly Springs and felt very much like a trip home for me to watch and listen to.

Combing forces with Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton, who both learned at the feet of masters Burnside and Kimbrough, the entire album is an artful take on electric hill country blues, at once very familiar but also very novel. Auerbach's falsetto brings a different dimension to "Going Down South," my favorite version of which is the opener to R.L.'s First Recordings. I did find some archived footage of him playing this song on YouTube, and it's worth a watch too.

Other standouts on The Keys' new album to me include "Do the Romp," a Kimbrough classic that never fails to get people dancing in live shows, and "Sad Days, Lonely Nights," which speaks to the feelings behind blues music on a universal level.

Yes, the album is amazing. Yes, you should go purchase it immediately. But as you enjoy the music and sounds of The Black Keys, I urge fans to explore the music history and heritage behind this newest album and their music overall...both the old school legends and the contemporary hill country blues masters. I'm a disciple of the blues, and I hope that after giving some of the music in this written piece a listen, you are, too!