Easily Ray Wylie Hubbard’s most musically satisfying recording, Eternal And Lowdown is a blues album — but for Hubbard the blues works the way bluegrass does for Steve Earle, more guiding spirit than constriction.
Propelled by Hubbard’s weathered but passionate voice, wicked slide work, and a spicy instrumental stew — producer Gurf Morlix’s swampy electric leads, Ian McLagan’s Hammond B-3, Eamon McLoughlin’s fiddle — the album conjures visions of what Mance Lipscomb might have sounded like sitting in on The Basement Tapes sessions, with the McCoury brothers hovering in the background.
Lyrically, Hubbard takes us on a rich, strange carnival ride through Delta swamps, Big Easy gambling dens and Texas roadhouses. We party with the ghosts of Hudie Ledbetter, Slim Harpo and Sir Douglas Sahm. In Hubbard’s world, “John The Revelator” rhymes with “an O Resonator made in 1934,” and it’s not just a cute effect; rather, music is itself a spiritual discipline.
A high priest of the low life, Hubbard is all the more powerful for shunning the surety of Sacrament and admitting that he is “somewhere in between/A lost soul and a romantic who believes/That if we live in forgiveness/We die in our dreams.” May his dreams be sweet, and flights of angels sing him to his rest.
