Kelly Joe Phelps

"Kelly Joe Phelps is creating some of the most emotionally thrilling blues music ever recorded. Phelps wrenches brilliant, vibrant melodies and phrases that range from poignant to piercing with only a slide running up and down the neck-no fretting involved. His hoarse voice is sincere and nakedly honest, wrought with pain and longing, despair and hope. Every song is moving, gripping, and immediate. It's truly emotional music, riding the tension between beauty and pain. Music this pure and penetrating is a rare treat".
- Dirty Linen Magazine

Phelps plays both traditional Delta-style blues and his own originals. His approach to playing an acoustic guitar on his lap, combining both finger picking with slide, along with a stompbox, results in a sound that's totally unique. His smoky unpretentious voice compliments the honesty of his playing. "If I used a numbering system to rate the releases I review, I'd rate this one an eleven."
- Music City Blues Society

Kelly Joe Phelps’ “Lead Me On" is the real deal: Lap slide guitar and vocals recorded live on analog tape, perfectly capturing the raw Delta Blues and dusty Americana style that defines Kelly Joe Phelps.
Not since Lucinda Williams debuted with an all-acoustic solo album of traditional country blues in 1979 has an artist appeared on the folk-blues scene with the immediate authority of guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps.

Equally indebted to traditional pioneers of Delta-style country blues like Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson as to more exploratory visionaries like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder (Phelps plays much of this album on a slack-tuned Hawaiian guitar, a style Cooder popularized), Phelps sings with dusty wisdom and plays like a master.
A former jazz bassist, Phelps has an impeccable sense of timing, essential to a music so immediate.

Opening with the traditional gospel tune "I've Been Converted" but focusing almost exclusively on magnificent originals after that, LEAD ME ON is an immensely satisfying, exciting album announcing the arrival of a major country-blues talent.

"Dad used to stomp his foot damn near through the floor punching out piano music he learned as a kid becoming the music I heard as a kid.

I've watched mine sit slack-jawed watching him weave magic and realize over and again the amazing strength of music. A straight line string running up down through and around. I could've said (sometime back) you can't see it - can be felt and heard, you are moved by and move with it - but now you and I can see colors (red flies across an orange-purple sky, white squares with green shadows flip-flop in a blue box inside painted yellow outside set on a black floor) so we can see music with other eyes.

These see what coffee tastes like, what a handshake feels like. Opening a can of beans with a jack-knife and eating them with the blade or listening to Doc Watson. Music serves a grand function in this crazy old world, and all of us, one way or another, are singers.
Let your song fly. The rest of us need it." - Kelly Joe Phelps

Click the album cover to listen to song samples from and learn more about Kelly Joe Phelps' stunning album “Lead Me On” (15 Year Anniversary Edition)

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For more information about Burnside Records artists, contact us:
800.288.2007 ext. 2049
info@burnsiderecords.com