R. C. Banks
Conway's Corner
Loud House Records

by William Michael Smith

R. C. Banks hails from Lubbock, lives now in Austin, and makes music that sounds like it could have come from South Louisiana or the Mississippi Delta. While he is a white man from the southwest, he possesses a black voice that wouldn't be out of place in a Southside Chicago blues club, at a crawfish festival in Opelousas, or at Artz Rib House in Austin. His fourth album, Conway's Corner, is thick and funky and greasy. It isn't Lean Cuisine, friends, it is a smorgasborg of pickled pigs feet and hard boiled eggs, of collard greens, black eyed peas, blood sausage and Tabasco sauce. If you're on a diet or have a heart condition, forget about it. But if you're ready for a down-home, poor-folks, southern musical banquet, dig in.

Banks, who has had songs recorded by Joe Ely, Linda Ronstadt and Will and Charlie Sexton, has combined influences like Jimmie Reed, Clifton Cheniere, Muddy Waters, Slim Harpo and Howlin' Wolf and, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, has absorbed and internalized these influences to create something entirely his own. While Banks doesn't have Vaughan's hot licks guitar prowess, there are lots of SRV vibrations in Bank's music, particularly in his raspy, feel-my-pain vocals and in his bruise-colored guitar tones. Banks also incorporates both Cajun and conjunto accordion in his sound stew as well as making frequent use of amplified harmonica from the Sonny Boy Williamson- Junior Wells school for added spice.

Banks can croon a soulful, bluesy, Neville Brothers style, slow-dancing New Orleans love song ("More Than The World To Me" and "Those Days Are Gone") or he can perfectly nail a lilting, shuffling Cajun waltz like "Jenny Jones." Mr. Banks knows the joints where this music comes from and where this music works. He knows how to put it across and he knows the lyrical sentiments that will ring true in that setting.

When I passed your daddy's house
And I peaked inside your door
You was layin' on the couch eatin' popcorn, gal,
And watchin' Jenny Jones
There's a dance down at the school,
Zydeco down to the school
If I had the courage I'd knock on your door,
But your pit bull is loose in the yard

"Great Scott's BBQ" shows Banks doing a harder, rockier, slightly more urban influenced Louisiana blues style akin to what C.C. Adcock did on his records which were wildly popular in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast in the late '80s, but never broke out nationally.

While half of Conway's Corner rises from roadhouses set back from numberless narrow roads along the bayous and through the swamps of the Gulf Coast, Banks' "Lonesome Texas" epitomizes the Texas blues thing. The sound is a raunchy roadhouse shuffle perfect for clubs in some vaguely defined no-man's area on the Texas-Louisiana border. With its raw, mean guitar, this is appropriate background music for a knife fight.

Conway's Corner has plenty of good material that fits comfortably like old shoes, but my favorite cut is "Pecan Trees." Given their lifestyles, musicians encounter (some may say deservedly) their share of domestic turmoil and career resistance. The musician in "Pecan Trees" can't understand why his family seems to be against him since "I got 3 gigs all lined up/From June until July/After that I can't say/I'm takin' it on the fly."

Fightin' with my family, they think that I'm a bum
The way that they've been judging me, I guess I must be one

They cut down all of my pecan trees, they're sprucin' up the yard
They're worried about what the neighbors think, if they could think at all

Banks completely shifts gears on the final track, "South Plains Panhandle Fair." Half Lubbock twanger, half carnival anthem, the track has a loose-jointed, barely-held-together, we've-had-a-couple-of-drinks Terry Allen vibe about it.

Conway's Corner, which incorporates blues, zydeco, roots rock, country and conjunto music, is an excellent example of the hybrid creation that the best Texas music has become. Banks' music is a mixing bowl of styles that all end up being "Texas blues" once they've been properly seasoned and simmered in his frying pan. The music is rough edged, it's not "pretty" and it certainly won't be for everybody, but it will have vast and lasting appeal to blues and roots fans worldwide. Hell, I live 130 miles from Austin, but I found out about R. C. Banks' Conway's Corner from a disc jockey friend in Australia. And he was right. It's good.

* Austin's accordion friendly Loud House Records is the place to find Ponty Bone and R.C. Banks. Check them out at www.loudhousemusic.com




Contact William Michael Smith at: wms-at-rockzilla.net

 
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