Live From Suwannee River Jam

Album Review

Live from Suwannee River Jam gives a thorough accounting of "hick hop" artist Colt Ford, as the self-proclaimed 300-lb. country rapper delivers his musical hybrid. Ford's insight is that rapping need not only be the province of African-Americans from the ‘hood, given that the redneck lifestyle, with its guns, alcohol, and lust, is not so far removed from rap's traditional subject matter. So, Ford simply raps about "Cold Beer" and trailer parks, unconcerned that he is borrowing his style from people rednecks are not traditionally thought of as sympathetic to. In fact, he traces his antecedents back to proto-redneck rappers like Charlie Daniels, covering "Devil Went Down to Georgia," and his "Like Me" is really Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" with the verses replaced by raps, emphasizing the similarity to another midtempo rock song with a killer riff that was thus transformed, Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," as redone by Run-D.M.C. And Ford concludes his last number, "Waffle House," by morphing it into the Marshall Tucker Band favorite "Can't You See." In between raps, he doesn't really come off like an arrogant rapper, instead self-deprecatingly referring to his weight and profusely thanking the enthusiastic crowd. But he has identified a strain of macho belligerence running through both traditional rap and outlaw country rock, and he makes it work for the crowd at Suwannee River Jam.