10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads

After I read a bit and was able to reframe this in my head as a blues Buena Vista Social Club, as opposed to my initial reaction of who, and oh god what is this cover, as something of a reset. Unfortunately for our Ken, I can't take the name 'Kenny Wayne' remotely seriously (how will he cope), but luckily this seems as much his record as the afore-mentioned could be considered a Ry Cooder and friends album. So, a trot through the blues with many of its elder statesmen. When they are all gone, I wonder, what will become of the blues as a genre? I'm not best placed to say as I share only a passing interest in it. Its not something I ever reach for, but if I am placed in a situation (like this, or I don't know, very rarely watching Jools Holland) where not through choice I am listening, I am generally impressed. The BB King track here is the first to truly prick up my ears, and it doesn't surprise me when I head to the tracklist and see it was he. But who are today's expert blues musicians? Anything I hear made in the last 10-15 years that is 'bluesy' seems to be either godawful blues-rock of the Jack White variety, or so horribly commercially polished that all authenticity and rawness that makes it good has long been processed out. So, from my admittedly ignorant viewpoint, I do fear for the genre. I enjoyed this record a lot more than I imagined I would, the obvious criticism has been made in that why wouldn't you submit a classic album from one of these people, but maybe there aren't classic albums - much of blues greatness seems to me to be in the live performance such as captured here, and hey, maybe they simply couldn't choose. so to the rating. I can't claim to have stayed fully engaged throughout, feels like there is a slump in the middle, or it just gets a bit samey, which is probably my chief criticism of the blues. I love it in small doses, never large. a high 3.

I have to lead with this: I have a genuine issue with how this is marketed. Naming Kenny Wayne Shepherd as the artist on this album feels bloody rich. The artists here are Neal Pattman, Clarence Brown, Bryan Lee, John Dee Holeman, and the rest of the legends and near-forgotten blues musicians he travelled the back roads of New Orleans, Shreveport, and Kansas to find and record, in juke joints and on front porches. True, Shepherd deliberately stays in the background on nearly every track, no guitar showboating, no attempt to be the star. This is a field-recording preservation project he financed and organised, using his own name and platform to get these players heard and documented before they were gone. Five of them died before the album and documentary were even finished. But that context matters, and I have a genuinely hard time rating this as a Kenny Wayne Shepherd record when it so clearly isn't one, in any meaningful sense. But holy shit, is this good. The music itself is absolutely fantastic. This is an album I could listen to over and over, and I deeply appreciate what Shepherd actually did here, using his position to preserve something that would otherwise have been lost. My issue is entirely with the framing, not with what's actually on the record. Five stars, and a genuine thank you to Jerry McCain, B.B. King, Henry Townsend, Etta Baker, and everyone else who made this what it is.

This is a pretty cool Blues music document but it’s too long for me.

There are better Kenny Wayne Shepherd albums and certainly better blues albums. This would have made a great concert, but makes a meh album.

An amalgamation of things I’ve heard others do better. Fun but not a stand out. 2.5 rounded down

Really well done blues collection.

While I did enjoy some of this album, it was a live compilation of different artists from different places, overlong, and not what I would consider a choice that fits the criteria. I feel one star is a little harsh, so two it is.

I'm not a big fan of the blues. It could have been a lot worse though.

Blues rock. Le iba a poner un 4 pero al final me ha aburrido. Ni fu ni fa.

It's a great album & I want to dig out the film as well, but I can't help feeling it's a bit of a cheat within the terms of reference for this project.

I was expecting cheesy country rock, but this is amazing! So many big names on one album, and you can just feel all the passion through the music. Beautiful and very human.

It's a blues covers album. Why would anyone need to listen to a Blues covers album? It's Karaoke Blues classics.

that classic (white) blues

Has enough legends and great playing to be worth a listen

Nothing wrong with KWS. But that's not really what this is. And while some of this is good. An hour and 16 minutes is just too long.

Blues, man. I dg it. The electric stuff was good and LOUD. Not that that is a bad thing. I actually liked some of the quieter songs on this one, like "Knoxville Rag." Reminded me more of Robert Johnson. I mean, it is pretty standard electric blues fare. But it is preformed well. Top tracks: "The Thrill Is Gone," "Tina Marie," "Knoxville Rag," "Spoonful,"

Look, there's tons of blues legends that could have one or several albums on the official list or even in the user list, there's no need for a compilation. I ended up listening my trove of Muddy Waters records. Hell, I much prefer Jonny Lang's Wander this World

Saw a pretty boy singing the blues and immediately wrote it off. Then he just played and let the best blues singers in the business sing instead. Perfect. Cannot imagine a better blues anthology.

So much more to this guy than “Blue on Black.” Great album, great submission.

This soundtrack is good but not as good the as the movie. Amazing group of artists on one record who are sadly all gone now.

Seemed like I needed to know the artist and all of the guests to enjoy this record. I'm sure it's someone's fantasy Avengers Team up, but it didn't do much for me.

I really like blues albums and this seemed to be a good one, but I sort of wish it was just a great blues album from one artist instead of a pseudo-greatest hits album.

Cool concept for a project, honoring and shining light on the legends of Mississippi Delta blues. I wasn't thrilled about this, but it was good. Much respect to this project.

Wow, what a story, and such a great project — thanks for sharing. Faves for me: The Thrill is Gone and Spoonful.

Pretty cool! Went from skepticism to enthusiasm pretty quickly. While I'd prefer to have more original seminal blues albums added to the list, we only get one pick each, so I understand the impulse to add this album get a selection of venerable featured artists instead. Fave tracks - "Potato Patch", "U-Haul" and "Spoonful"

Many have said it better than me but blues (outside of Robert Johnson and Django - got a soft spot there) I just don't get. This is probably it at it's finest and it's ok. I don't get why this is more important than any other though. Monday open mic nights with 60 minutes blues jams while I was waiting to play next have biased me perhaps.

Must have been a blast to make this album!

I just don’t feel like this fits on this list to be honest. It was like so mid and I just don’t really know.

Reading some of the other reviews gives a better picture than I can - how much of a "Kenny Wayne Shepherd" album is this? Not that it really matters I suppose - especially with this being a soundtrack to a live show. I'd say I'm almost actively not a fan of tribute/cover albums so I wasn't excited or interested in this. But - but - overall it was better than I'd expected. Excellent sound (live) helps for sure. Just that blues albums have to be something really different/special for me to sustain interest. I honestly don't know what that would be...? Oddly for me, the varied singers *do* make this album stretch a bit longer than it would have for me - straight blues really is about attitude bc it sure as shit isn't much beyond I-IV-V if even that. Anyways blahblah it was nice to hear, there's that similarity to too many songs especially in the middle (Chapel Hill Boogie / Tear Come Rollin') that slows it all down (although the Knoxville Rag was a nice change of pace), so it'll never be a favourite, I'll take something like Muddy Waters' "Hard Again" as a good example of a blues album that sustained for me as after ~11 songs I was all set here. 6/10 3 stars. IMO: Belonged in the book? No.

Solid blues album but no new ground broken

Surprisingly decent album of blues covers.

Not bad

10/10 love me some blues infectiously fun, I adore this stuff

I imagine this would be pretty decent if you're into blues. Big confession time...I just don't understand the allure of blues. Every song sounds the same to me and even that sound is just mediocre. 2/5

I appreciate the history behind the album and the traditions saved for posterity by the album. Will I listen again? Eh….

I wasn't terribly excited about this, since I'm not much for blues and Shepherd's previous work didn't leave much of an impression on me. This, however, is a really cool idea and I think he did a great job with it. It gives you a high quality recording to help introduce a new generation to the classic era of the blues. I think it would have been easy to do this cynically or poorly, but Shepherd does a good job keeping the light on the blues greats while making the music interesting 4/5

"White man takes credit for efforts of black artists." Maybe I'm being cynical, but you *did* make your face way bigger than anybody else on the album cover. 5-star music, 2-star execution.

This was fine, but blues music is blues music, and so I can only care for so much of it. The Thrill Is Gone was the best, and there was an hour of content after that.

I like blues but this was really a compilation album and I don't really think it works for this project. Agreed with some other comment that says submit an album by one of those legends instead. My personal rating: 3/5 My rating relative to the list: 3/5 Should this have been included on the original list? No.

If this is blues it might be OK. But with a name like "Kenny Wayne Shepherd" there's a danger that this might actually be country, and that would be very bad... Thankfully - it is blues. From real bluesmen. Which is nice. Unfortunately, it's also live - and as we've established, any live album will start proceedings at the lowest possible rating. It is fairly well recorded, and thankfully there is little audience noise discernible in the early tracks. Asides from a few "woos" the audience noise doesn't really come in until the end of "the thrill is gone (with B.B. King)" - and that also commits the cardinal sin of soliciting the audience for participation. "You can do better than that" - I'm sure they can, but I'm not going to applaud in my own fucking house am I? We do not need such guff on an album recording. As we carry on, it becomes clearer that the production isn't actually quite as good as it first appeared. Basslines sound muddy. Fiddles sound scratchy - and that's absolutely as you'd want it to be from blues recorded 50+ years ago. This was 2007 for crying out loud, buy some decent mics! I do have to love the idea of getting a whole stack of genuine greats together to capture something from them. It's a lovely way to nod to the past. Overall, from our "live album" default score, it gets points for being a good idea. It gets a couple for having such a treasure trove of musicians, and for the coordinator to graciously let those treasures have the spotlight. As an exercise and a piece, I think it's grand. As an album, it is not. I'd prefer to hear better-produced, studio-recorded stuff.

I love the Blues.

Good fun blues album, while it appreciates the legends of the genre not sure I would come back to this over any of the orginal artists output.

This is a pretty good blues album but it feels like it’s more of a compilation of classics rather than anything ground breaking which for blues is hard to do. There were several features that I recognized, but I couldn’t tell what was and wasn’t done by shepherd. He may be solid at the guitar but that’s not enough to make this album have any replay ability. I’d rather hear the classics when they were originally made. 5.3/10

This may be something I could grow to like, but no individual song hit me just right on my initial listen. I can see for a true blues fan how this can be an amazing album.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd, modern blues bigtimer, saw the writing on the wall back in the mid-2000s and realized that many pioneering blues legends would likely not be around for much longer. Leveraging his clout at the time, he organized a series of jams with a number of these blues oldtimers (most notably B.B. King) a recorded them over the course of 10 days. Shepherd also interviewed these legends for a DVD of the same name, but I'll only be listening to the album. 10 Days Out is a long, true-blues album. I recognize the desire to immortalize these great musicians on a single album, but the fact of the matter is that blues doesn't really have the same power that it did in the early-to-mid 20th century. So while listening to a blues album from 2007 is nice and all, I would much prefer to hear the classics in their original recordings. I do not think a blues revival will ever catch on as long as rock music still prevails, unfortunately. CONTENDER FOR THE LIST: The list could use some more blues but I don't think this album would be a good fit.

Rating: 6/10 Best songs: The thrill is gone

Unique and terrific sound. Cool collabs, outside my comfort zone but a solid addition to the list

I went through a big blues phase in my early twenties, but since then I haven't listened much. So this was really good to refresh my love of the blues. Really strong stuff. 4 stars.

Favorite songs: The Thrill is Gone, Born in Louisiana, Prison Blues, Tina Marie, Chapel Hill Boogie, Spoonful, Grindin' Man Least favorite songs: Honky Tonk 4/5

Blues songs kind of sound the same to me but this was fine.

I love me a country album, but an hour and 22 minutes was a little intimidating. Also didn’t really stand out as anything more than country I’m sorry to say.

ok some late 2000s blues. This guy has chops. Its absolutely dance club and bigger venue blues. This was enjoyable!

I wouldn't have minded some actual Kenny Wayne Shepherd on the list somewhere as I think his stuff is generally better than lots of the modern country offerings we've been given but 10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads isn't the best way to bring him to wider attention. The concept is really good, bring a bunch of Blues legends together and do some classics with a bit of modern but stripped back production, and it's certainly nice enough to listen to, but they're not as good as the originals in any instance and it just lacks something that elevates it above a tribute act. 3/5, easy and gentle listen, but KWS is basically a logistics dude here, not the artist, and it's a compilation of merely okay.

My first thought about this record is that it seems odd to call this a Kenny Wayne Shepard record when he’s not the vocalist or star performer on these songs. So when I went to allmusic.com to read their review, and they concurred, I cracked up a little. Here’s the opening sentence of their review: “10 Days Out may well be Kenny Wayne Shepherd's most important and intriguing album, even though the guitarist is hardly the featured artist on any of these tracks, working instead more as a sideman and facilitator for the impressive cast of venerable blues players who get a chance to shine here.” A bit of a back-handed compliment, no? The most important and intriguing record of Kenny Wayne Shepard’s career is one where he is not the focus? Ouch. I get their point, though. This record is more of an attempt to record and preserve the history of the blues and of the players featured on it, rather than a spotlight for Kenny Wayne Shepard. Fair enough. In that regard, it succeeds. The songs and performances are all fantastic. If you are into the Blues, I suspect this could be an important record - I don’t know for sure, though: I’m not really in tune with the intricacies of that musical scene and, maybe more importantly, Kenny Wayne Shepard’s status within it. So yeah, it was enjoyable for a blues outsider such as myself, but with in the realm of “must-hear” blues records, I’m not the person to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. I did enjoy the version of “The Thrill is Gone” included here - it was nice to hear a different take on the song than I’m used to. The band was cooking on that one, damn.

Love unappologetic country music

Pristine and pleasurable to hear (as far as the blues can be), though by-the-book renditions of blues standards and classics. And good to be intro'd to a few artists one didn't know (or not very well anyway). But is it really a KWS record or are compliations like this a bit of a cheat code? One assumes the recommender was trying to just increase the volume of blues within this project. Honestly, thought, one would prefer a record by Cootie or Pinetop or ... still, rounding up because this record's heart (and that of the recommender) is in the right place.

Not a big blues guy so I enjoyed the breadth you had with this record. Well worth the listen.

Good blues! More good, Wikipedia-ing this guy led me to a blues supergroup he was in with Stephen Stills. Badass

A pretty rousing album. Ya love to hear the crowd totally grooving with along with the energy of the musicians.

The Blues isn’t something I seek out and I approached this like I would a book assignment in high school English class. I looked around a bit for the associated movie, but couldn’t find it anywhere without paying so I started up the audio. I have to say that like a lot of those high school book assignments, once I got into this I really enjoyed it. A great way to hear a lot of blues with great audio quality. That hour+ runtime flew by and I’m glad to have listened to this.

Yep, it's a very good collaborative blues album, also documented through a film documentary that is probably a blast to watch, apparently. The sound is authentic, grassroots, sincere, heartfelt, you name it. "Honky Tonk" is a terrific acoustic cut, to take one example from a small group of highlights. Not sure what the project brings that would be pivotal to the overall genre, though -- even if I'm not a world expert, admittedly. Yeah, the cast is stellar. But it also points to the derivative nature of the whole accomplishment. Like, how many times do we have to hear the same frigging chord progression all over again? Case in point: the second track. Select key Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, BB King or Junior Wells albums and be done with it. Of course, you could probably say the same sort of thing about the two or three dozens of post-punk albums on my own list -- although they do harbor very different chord progressions from one LP to the next, mind you. Guess that subjective tastes have got to play a part at some point in the endeavor that gathers all here. 🤷 No shading on the sincere user who suggested this album, I hope. 3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. 8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3) ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ----- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 52 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 70 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 125 (including this one). --- Hey, Émile. Tu as déjà dû voir ma dernière réponse sous la review de *Young, Loud And Snotty* des Dead Boys ! J'essaie d'écrire la mienne bientôt

Jag gillar inte blues.

Bleh

I'd never heard of this! Now I need to figure out where to watch the film. It sounds fascinating!

Interesting backstory that absolutely makes this a piece of musical history, but I'm also never really in the mood to listen to 50 minutes of worse and noodlier versions of blues classics. Cool submission though.

Blues rock. Le iba a poner un 4 pero al final me ha aburrido. Ni fu ni fa.

Sounds like it's from about 50 years earlier than it actually came out. Really shows the influence of the blues on country, and vice versa, and I really liked it. Thanks for the suggestion

Just an odd pick for the list all-around – Shepard inserts himself into some classics played by the all-time greats as a documentary soundtrack of sorts? Way better comps and actual blues LPs missing from the list that deserve an add. Not that this is a bad album per se, the greats are the greats for a reason, but this isn’t an artistic statement really - just a collection of tracks around a common theme produced as a byproduct of a film.

This just felt a little strange to me. Going around and playing with blues legends is fine and all, but the main artist doesn’t really make an impression. It’s sort of just a compilation of blues musicians playing some of their best songs live. I enjoyed it. I think it’s an odd pick. 3/5

Basically what it says it is. I dunno, it's ok. 3/5.

Hour-long blues digression

Not as bad as I feared but absolutely too long

a very tasty album of blues songs and standards.

I appreciate the music but think this is more of a compilation of aged Blues Legends accompanied by some bloke I've not heard about than aything else. Why not have an album by one of the greats in their prime?

Listening to the blues at this point feels to be approaching the territory of something like listening to chamber music; it may be a fine and traditioned thing but you're not likely to hear anything new. Of course not everything needs to be new. This was very good for what it was, and of course had a deep roster of featured singers and players. Just solid blues.

Excellent album. Would listen to again.

I definitely enjoyed the blue tour though it definitely seemed it was more a result of the legends he had accompanying him on every track. Nothing new or really original, just solid blues. Worthy listen.

Well I'll be damned. I thought this was going to be a chore - an overly long blues album. But this took me by surprise. Perhaps it helped that I have no real connection with the genre and therefore only knew very few of the songs, but this felt like a nice greatest hits record. A glaring omission is Hank Doyle with 'Me and the Blues'.

I never really felt the blues myself, but I was quite intrigued by the concept of 10 Days Out. There are some mighty legends on this record, and I’m sure that I would have enjoyed the film even more - it must have been a thrilling ride producing this. The record? Just another blues record - albeit with some crazy features throughout.

Blues baby.

It must have been great fun and an honor for Kenny Wayne Shepherd to work with all these blues legends. Too bad it's just an album with subpar versions of well known blues classics you can find on an abundance of compilations in better shape. It's nice to hear B.B. King, but as most of the contributors, he is var from his magnificent shape years ago. In the end it is ok as an album and nothing more.

Lovely blues album