Slick Ballinger: Mississippi Soul

Twenty-one-year-old Slick Ballinger picked up the guitar at age fifteen. He’s shared the stage with such artists as B.B. King and Pinetop Perkins, and even though 94-year-old Othar Turner of the Mississippi Rising Star Fife and Drum Band took young Slick under his wing and taught him to live and breath the blues in a small house with no electricity or running water, there seems to be one key element missing on his debut album: SOUL.

Forgive me for saying this, but a white man can’t play the blues like a black man. Slick Ballinger is living proof of this. Black Americans from the southern states or delta region have much inspiration to sing the blues. The Blues evolved from Negro spirituals that were sung in the cotton fields with call and response choruses. The songs are mixed with the pain of slavery, racial tension, and poverty; these are all main ingredients of the blues.

Yes, on the other hand, the blues, like all genres of recorded music, is ever changing. From the early tags of race music, country-blues, ragtime, prewar, postwar, boogie-woogie, folk-blues, piedmont, electric, the rock hybrid, and now the modern state, sadly, the blues will never be the same as it was.

Slick Ballinger is young and has a lot to learn, and I don’t really see the younger Fat Possum Records crowd digging him – let alone the Chicago blues fans of Chess and Muddy Waters. I feel like Steve Buscemi’s character in GhostWorld when I say this, but he’s more like Stevie Ray Vaughn or John Mellencamp than he is Howlin Wolf. My advice to you is save your money and buy the Charley Patton box on Revenant or some Big Bill Broonzy records.

– Jason Verhagen
Slick Ballinger (Oh Boy)