BLUES ON THE OUTSIDE features Angolan guitarist Nuno Mindelis and includes 15 tracks and features "Grass Is Greener" and "I Know What You Want."
~cduniverse.com
Blues on the Range is a nice, but not particularly noteworthy, set of traditional blues. What makes the album worth a listen is Roy Rogers' facility as a slide player - he can make his guitar sing. However, the quality of the songs and performances are slightly uneven, making it only of interest to die-hard fans.
A northern California-based blues guitarist, Roy Rogers works firmly out of a Delta blues acoustic style and is particularly good with a slide. A member of John Lee Hooker's '80s Coast to Coast Band, Rogers produced and played on Hooker's Grammy-winning comeback album, The Healer, and its follow-up, Mr. Lucky. During the early '70s, Rogers played with a variety of Bay Area bar bands…
Veteran blues pianist (and longtime Howlin' Wolf sideman) Emery Williams Jr. - known professionally as Detroit Junior - has had a renaissance of sorts in the past decade, releasing three albums on Blue Suit Records, and now this one, Blues on the Internet, on Delmark Records. Williams is a throwback to the classic Chicago blues piano style, and his warm, expressive vocals fall somewhere between a hoarse Ray Charles and a latter-day Bob Dylan, while his songwriting, although hardly innovative, is solid and workmanlike, avoiding most of the obvious blues clichés. His intent isn't to move blues into the 21st century so much as preserve the way it was played in Chicago in the 1950s (where Williams played alongside the likes of Jimmy Reed, Eddie Boyd, Eddie Taylor, and Little Mack Simmons), and he succeeds wonderfully on original tracks here…