by Stewart Mason
Just as the title implies, Raw is Bobby Rush at his most elemental: a man, his acoustic guitar, and his foot stamping out a beat on an amplified board. A little harmonica now and then, and a Dobro played with a bottleneck slide on the rollicking &Glad to Get You Back,& but that's it for ornamentation. Although most of 13 songs are Rush originals, he also essays three standards, Larry Williams' early rock classic &Boney Maroney,& Muddy Waters' &Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,& and -- fearlessly -- &Howlin' Wolf& itself, which he slows down into a funereal dirge. Rush calls his music &folk funk,& but in reality, Rush is the modern equivalent of the first country bluesmen, before the moves to Memphis and Chicago added full-band arrangements and electricity. But Rush isn't a hidebound traditionalist attempting to resurrect a past form for its own sake; Raw crackles with the energy of a musician who knows that he's working in the style that best suits his own personal gifts. This is a hundred times more listenable than yet another blues band plodding through a set of tenth-generation rewrites of &Sweet Home Chicago,& and could well be the blues recording of 2007.