Carolina Bluesman

Album Review

Little Pink Anderson is the son of Piedmont songster Pink Anderson, who recorded for Columbia back in 1928, for Riverside in 1950, and for Prestige-Bluesville in 1961. The elder Anderson was hardly innovative, but his recordings remain valuable because they preserve the kind of popular material played on the old Southern medicine show circuit, which Anderson traveled for years — Little Pink even was even part of dad's act as a child, tap dancing while the elder Anderson sang and played. An accomplished electric guitarist, Anderson plays acoustic on this release (accompanied by a second acoustic guitarist, Cool John Ferguson), an unabashed tribute to the songs of his father. The younger Anderson has a smoother, more pliant voice than his father had, but the guitar styles are remarkably similar, and the result is a low-key delight, with Little Pink presenting his father's arrangements of such classic folk-blues pieces as "Betty & Dupree," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "St. James Infirmary" (the first song Little Pink learned from his father), and what became the elder Anderson's signature song, "Greasy Greans." There is a lot of love and joy (and maybe a good deal of private reckoning) in this disc (which takes as its title the title of one of Pink Anderson's Blueville LPs), and something profoundly reassuring, as well, in knowing that the Piedmont songster tradition has been passed on into such capable hands.