Wednesday, 16 December 2015

Jerry Corbitt - Corbitt [1969], album review



70s Representative

This is a great late 60s album, just remastered, and I first became aware of Jerry Corbitt when his superb if brisk song Let the Music Get Inside appeared on the wonderful Polydor compilation album Way In to the 70s.


That song leads off this 1969 album, the gritty vocal – with a couple of great near-yodels – as punchy as the snappy guitar work [both that opener and eighth ragtime The Rain Song contain the lyrics blow your mind and I think this was a perfect fit for Polydor’s target audience for this record]. Listening to Corbitt’s Youngblood song Grizzly Bear of 1967 gives an indication of the fine playing and singing, and on second track here Out of the Question he sings with gutsy passion again whilst the acoustic guitar solo is folk-blues perfection, a synth orchestrating heavily in the background for heightened atmosphere. Country Girl, which is a proper countryrock hoe-down, and straighter country Queen of England, both signal his later work with Charlie Daniels. Ninth Banned in Boston returns to the rock singing with superb blues harmonica in support of the guitar picks. The most 70s/psychedelic song is closer The Kahuna Song with its anti-war lyrics, an earnestly emotive folk song.

Corbitt on the far right


No comments:

Post a Comment