When she paid tribute to
Robert Johnson
on her 2006 album
The Lady and Mr. Johnson
,
Rory Block
tried to replicate
Johnson
's style exactly. She was not so reverent on 2008's
Blues Walkin' Like a Man
, a tribute to
Son House
, and on the third album she considers part of her Mentor Series, she takes some creative license with
Mississippi Fred McDowell
on
Shake 'Em on Down
. One difference is that she actually met
House
and
McDowell
, which seems to have freed her to take a more creative approach. She acknowledges that
's driving, repetitive playing also served as a challenge, noting that he played more for dancing, intent on keeping a constant rhythm, than with any sense of virtuosity. And while she has counted the number of times a given figure might have been repeated in a particular performance of one of his songs, in her own versions she has added solo guitar lines to the basic riffs and also included other features, such as overdubbed vocal choruses. She also has written songs concerning
, such as the leadoff track,
"Steady Freddy,"
an imagined autobiography, and its successor,
"Mississippi Man,"
her account of meeting the bluesman when she was 15. And she has adapted some of his songs, switching gender on
"Good Morning Little School Girl"
(which she acknowledges uneasily as being about "child predation") and
"The Girl That I'm Lovin'."
All of this is to say that she has applied a fan and scholar's attention as well as an artist's vision to
and his work, demonstrating that a tribute requires both. ~ William Ruhlmann