Artist: Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band
Album: The House of the Blue Lights
Genre: Blues, R&B, Soul
Release Date: 1969/2012
Audio Format:: FLAC (tracks) 24 bit, 96 kHz
Duration: 43:06
Total Tracks: 11
Total Size: 927 MB

Tracklist:

01. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Key To The Highway (02:21)
02. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Mad Dog Blues (03:28)
03. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – The Blues Don’t Knock (03:13)
04. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Blues Ain’t Nothing But a Good Woman on Your Mind (03:13)
05. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – The House of Blue Lights-Part 1 (07:32)
06. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Four Woman (03:34)
07. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Steady Roller (03:17)
08. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Homemade Love (06:25)
09. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – But I Forgive You (02:31)
10. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – Shut Your Mouth (03:24)
11. Don Covay & The Jefferson Lemon Blues Band – The House of Blue Lights-Part 2 (04:02)

Download:

This is not the vintage Don Covay sound that many of his fans may know about and you won’t find any of his big hits on this CD but this 1969 album sounds like a labor of love, something that Covay was dying to record for a long, long time. You can hear the sincerity, vitality and enthusiasm on every track. Wonderful album. As other reviewers have noted. this is a bit of a hybrid. Not a traditional blues album by any means, but one that mixed blues with soul and a dash of rock too. Very satisfying results. There are times when Covay is singing, that I swear it’s Mick Jagger. The vocal inflections are that similar sometimes. But the real highlights are the songs themselves, plus the guitar playing. Something to savor.This album, credited to Don Covay and the Jefferson Lemon Blues Band, is not only a great record on its own terms, but it’s sort of a black parallel/precursor to a few blues-rock LPs by white artists that sold a hell of a lot more copies around the same time. On the one hand, it’s as solid a blues album as anyone associated with R&B was making in 1969 and contains some of the best guitar-based blues on Atlantic this side of that one-off Blind Willie McTell record that they did at the end of the ’40s. The guitar blues, interspersed with some organ-based numbers, mixes with Covay’s whooped and hollered vocals like someone caught a performance at some roadhouse 20 miles from nowhere in Mississippi — except that it’s perfectly recorded, like someone sneaked Atlantic producer Herb Abramson and a late-’60s tape unit into a roadhouse 20 miles from nowhere. But the repertory ranges wider than that description would lead one to believe, from standards like “Key to the Highway” and “But I Forgive You Blues” to a brace of Covay originals, including the jaunty “Four Women,” the soulful “Homemade Love” (which manages to be smooth, raw, and cute, all in six minutes), and two parts of “House of Blue Lights” — not the Freddie Slack/Don Raye song popularized by the Andrews Sisters, Merrill Moore, and Chuck Berry, but, rather, a mournful lament akin thematically and in tempo to the original “House of the Rising Sun,” only more intense and serious. The organ, mouth harp, and guitar textures achieved on that seven-minute song ripple and shimmer as though lifted and slowed down from the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” while “But I Forgive You Blues” goes back to ’20s and early-’30s basics (and is really cool, with the guitars isolated on one channel so you can appreciate the playing up close and personal). Much of the album sounds like the sonic and spiritual blueprint for Let It Bleed and Exile on Main Street and parts of Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. Reissued in 2002 by the Sepiatone label in state-of-the-art sound and worth tracking down at twice the price they’re charging (which is about what a vinyl copy would cost if you did find one). – Bruce Eder