Billy Lee Riley - Hot Damn! (Capricorn)
Reviewed by Walter Carter

I've always thought of him as being too genuine a rebel and a wildman, even in the context of '50s rockabillies, to deal successfully with the music business. In reality, he did form his own successful record label, and he spent some time in L.A. working with Herb Alpert and Johnny Rivers, but my image of him was formed in 1981 when I tried to track him down in connection with a newspaper article. Knox Phillips at Sun told me Billy Lee was in Arkansas, hanging drywall for a living, and he didn't have a telephone. My image of him as a rebel was reinforced when I looked down the song list on Hot Damn! and saw "Time Ain't on My Side," which to me is a statement of rebellion against rock's legendary rebel band (The Rolling Stones and their hit "Time Is on My Side").

The first cut, "Fine Little Mamma," sounds like a prototypical rockabilly song, except without the "rave-up" performance element. It's just a straightforward boogie blues. The next cut, "Winter Time Blues," is a slow, sad blues in 6/8 time (in the same vein as "Stormy Monday"). It's followed by "I'm Him," a roughly assertive blues. "Time Ain't on My Side" turns out to be a dark, unsettling spiritual song--the opposite of what I expected.

So much for judging a CD by its cover. Rockabilly rebellion is not what Hot Damn! is all about. Riley recorded the album at Sun Studios in Memphis, fronting a four-piece band with his Gibson Blueshawk and harmonica, but the musical atmosphere he re-creates goes back to a time before rock 'n' roll, before his Sun recordings. Riley grew up in the 1930s and '40s on cotton plantations in Arkansas, where he was heavily influenced by a bluesman named Jericho Leon Carter, aka Lightnin' Leon. Carter died in 1947, and he never made a record. His music lives on only in Billy Lee Riley, who uses the name Lightnin' Leon when he performs in blues settings.

"This is the blues as I remember it played on the porches of the black plantation workers when I was a kid," Riley says in the liner notes. "It's not 'produced' blues; it is raw simple and honest blues, just the way it was done back then."

Hot Damn! is Billy Lee Riley's tribute to Lightnin' Leon and other blues artists of his youth--in essence the roots of a roots musician.