Product Description

Critically hailed 1975 solo, duo and trio performances by the late master, featuring Louisiana Red (guitar, harp) and Sugar Blue (harp).

Track Listing

1. Too Wet to Plow
2. Travelling Back Home
3. Hot Tamale
4. Moanin' the Blues
5. Red Sun
6. Winding Mind
7. You Better Turn Around
8. Wind Is Blowin'
9. Trouble's All I See
10. 30 Days in Jail
11. Pay Day Woman
12. Epilog

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378147 in Music
• Released on: 2005-07-12
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD
On a 1975 album ten freshly composed country blues and a version of Robert Johnson's "Hot Tamale" exist as splendent rubies in the coronet of Johnny Shines. Slide guitarist/harpist Louisiana Red (on six songs), harmonica player Sugar Blue (five), and bassist Ron Rault (two) perform pithily at this studio procession, but it's Shines who's the regal personage all the way-articulate, unimpeachable, powerful, understated, innately musical, improvisatory. -- © Frank John Hadley 1993

Review
Too Wet to Plow captures the brooding, unrepentant passion of the Mississippi blues like no music I've heard in years. It's a record Johnny Shines, born in Memphis in 1915, has had in him for a long time: an unelectrified, completely personal statement that speaks as well for the cutting power of country blues in the late Seventies as Muddy Waters' Hard Again did for that of Chicago blues. Robert Johnson, Shines' mentor and the greatest of all country blues artists, called the blues a heart disease, and that's what Too Wet to Plow is - the disease and the cure.
Too Wet to Plow has the power of such blues, but the point of view is different. Working with Louisiana Red (guitar and harp) and Sugar Blue (a superb young harpman from Brooklyn) or alone, Shines communicates not rebellion but acceptance. It's as if he's gone far enough, grown old enough, to believe that in some essential way he won't be beaten; that from now on, the battle with life will be on his terms, or at least on terms he has long understood. There's great tension in the music, but there's an unbreakable peace, too - not peace of mind so much as peace of soul. The music comes out of a no man's land that is also a hometown. Shines offers a house built right on the edge. It's his voice that builds the house, it's his guitar that defines the edge. On "The Wind is Blowin'," "Moanin' the Blues" and - with grace not received from God but snatched from Him - "You Better Turn Around," Shines plays the most spare, softly echoing notes imaginable. The guitar seems to shrink from the singer's pronouncements (as it does on Robert Johnson's "Come on in My Kitchen"), to retreat and then slip back, now threatening, now comforting. This blues creates a silence asking to be broken. In "The Wind Is Blowin'," there's a line about leaves whistling on the trees, but in "You Better Turn Around," you hear them.
What you hear in Shines' voice is the essence of his acceptance: compassion. His voice is deep, thick, rich, sometimes swooping high but mostly very steady: a voice held in check. It extends that compassion as far as it will reach - to you, to anyone you might be thinking of, to Shines himself. There's not a trace of the self-pity so central even to many of the greatest blues; Shines steps outside himself considers his place in the world, draws you into his body, and then, still standing a few steps off, tells you where you are: where, for the moment, you live.
The music on Too Wet to Plow is played in country time, which means that on the ensemble numbers the musicians find their own rythms. The beat is not kept so much as it is passed from man to man, giving each musician the freedom he needs to find his own voice. Such music can sound clumsy, unsure - but only at first. After a time, what you hear is confidence and delight. Those are the emotions that drive the acceptance of Shines' music home, make it seem natural, preordained, derived not from culture but from, say, the weather. One doesn't know whether to be surprised that, forty years after the country blues achieved its finished shape, the form - in Shines' hands anyway - seems not to have dated at all. Johnny Shines seems to speak not in the unfamiliar accents of styles that are "revived," but simply to speak clearly, and without wasting a word. --Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone

Customer Reviews

Delta Blues at its best.
Though Robert Johnson's career was cut short and the works of Tommy Johnson and Charlie Patton have long ago fallen out of the limelight, Johnny Shines played the blues better than any of them, but he never got the recognition he deserved. An intelligent and soft-spoken man, Shines did anything but fit the stereotype of a bluesman.
Johny Ned Lee Shines, Jr. was a friend and travelling companion of the inimitable Robert Johnson. Along the way, he learned a thing or two, as evidenced by his absolutely brilliant playing and technical mastery of the Delta-style slide blues. His voice is undoubtedly stronger and more emotive than virtually any bluesman before him. "Too Wet To Plow" and the live recording "Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop!" are two of the most striking examples of Shines' work, and traditional blues in general. "Too Wet To Plow" is a near flawless work. While all well-done Delta blues recordings before were(to some)unlistenable, the recording quality on this record is perfect.
Altogether, a true masterwork by a master of a dying style of music.