“Acoustic blues,” said the gent at the door of Buddy Guy’s Legends a few Wednesdays ago when a prospective customer asked him what Rory Block’s show was going to be like. “It’s just a girl singing.”
Block has said that since being introduced to the blues at age 14 she’s felt that “the spirit of the music is in me,” and she doesn’t try to be anything she isn’t–no posing, no red-hot-mama histrionics or theatrical affectations. Her dedication to the music is palpable, but it’s not the stereotypical hard-bitten emotional surrender of the hard-traveling blues player. Watching Block perform is akin to watching a classical pianist immersed in the majesty of tradition. She’s a passionate, living repository of a canon that’s not her own.
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Although she’s best known as a purveyor of Delta blues, Block’s guitar talents shone most brightly when she switched to the light, complex finger-picking styles of the Piedmont region, which rely more on nuance than stark intensity. The music of the Piedmont artists–Blind Willie McTell, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, and others–doesn’t seem as wedded to a particular time and place as the heavy, portentously emotional Delta blues, and perhaps for that reason the Piedmont styles have long been favored by white folk-blues guitarists.
Unfortunately Block seemed unable to let this music speak for itself. It’s one thing to augment the passionate intensity of Delta blues with heartfelt balladry, and quite another to try to transform a blues club into a confessional. The audience grew increasingly distracted as Block’s spoken intros became longer, filled with references to bonding and relationships and new-age philosophizing.
