Five-time Grammy award winning blues master Keb Mo will play two concerts in our area this weekend: Saturday, June 17th in Selbyville, DE and Sunday, June 18th in Williamsburg, VA.
At 71, Keb Mo remains one of the one of the most consistently creative and authentic singer/ songwriters in the blues idiom, but he didn’t get to be Keb Mo overnight. It took twenty-five years of working in the music business.
When he was starting out, Kevin Moore (as he was originally called) worked in Calypso bands and toured with Jefferson Starship. When he recorded his debut album “Rainmaker” on Casablanca records in 1980, he tried establishing himself as an r and b artist. Speaking on the phone from his tour bus, he described that first effort as a flop.
“I don't think I was ready, in any sense of the word,” Keb Mo said. “But the opportunity came that that failure kind of made me what I am today, because that led me to doing gigs, that I probably wouldn't normally have done in blues.
Playing the Blues, says Keb Mo, enlightened him to the missing ingredient in all his other music: authenticity.
“Your failures are your business biggest successes, actually” Keb Mo said. “Because they teach you things about what not to do. So, I really embraced the blues, because now it's about the truth. And so, the best thing about the blues is that it added truth to my musical fabric and made it more relevant, I think.
In 1969, Keb Mo saw a concert featuring the iconic blues man Taj Mahal. This artist, says Keb Mo, was one of his greatest musical inspirations.
“He was taking blues in all different directions,” says Keb Mo. “I really loved what he was doing with the blues. It was more like a rural, kind of like, down home. funky folky kind of blues with banjos and slide guitars and things… I loved that,” Keb Mo said.
Some opportunities to work in LA theatre helped Keb Mo unlock his musical identity. He played a Delta Blues man called Rabbit Foot in a local production and then was cast in the role of Robert Johnson in a blues documentary called “Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl.” Two of the songs on Keb Mo’s 1994 debut were Robert Johnson songs. He says that Johnson’s music remains a staple of his repertoire.
“Robert Johnson was kind of like a doorway for me to get into the blues and the doorway into like, finding myself because Robert Johnson clearly was his own man,” says Keb Mo…” His writing, the way he approached writing the songs…gave me permission to do me.
Keb Mo’s ability to stay true to himself has stood him in good stead through the all the twists and turns of the music business and the topsy turvy nature of life during the pandemic. He rose to the challenge of navigating that difficult period with an album called “Good to Be” which he says was rooted in COVID, especially a song recorded with Old Crow Medicine Show called “Medicine Man.”
It's just the… songs that were written during the pandemic, (of) which Medicine Man was a centerpiece and also “Marvelous to Me,” which was written around all the social disturbances during that time, namely, ... George Floyd, and what not,” says Keb Mo.
He adds that the album contained a mixture of a lot of feelings, and he wasn’t entirely certain it would come off.
“When I put it all out, you know, I looked at it and it fit together perfectly. So, I'm really happy with that record,” says Keb Mo.
Keb Mo’s latest recording “Good to Be” is available from Rounder Records.
