The Family Band: Robert Randolph's Steel Guitar

                  Robert Randolph and the Family Band will be performing at Charlestown’s Rhythm and Roots Festival which takes place Sept. 3-5.  He will be playing songs from his new album, “We Walk This Road.”  The album is linked together by six “segues.”  The legendary T Bone Burnett, the album’s producer, plucked these eighty and ninety year-old songs from public archives.  Each segue’s brief, muffled, and often a capella clip is the kernel from which Randolph’s album pops. 

                  Randolph’s “Dry Bones,” for example, came out of Mitchell’s Christian Singers’ “Them Bones.”  The album’s bluesy, short lyrics snap in quick bursts leaving the end of each line ready for a clean tambourine.  But instead, Randolph leaves it bare.  The result is a balder more traditional blues feel with a mild guitar, the heavy thump of drums, and the barbershop repetition of the chorus’s catchy lyrics. 

Randolph’s clear if thin voice stands mostly unsupported in songs like “I Still Belong To Jesus” and “Don’t Change,” succeeding beautifully in the former.  The song’s moody guitar is present just enough to remind the listener why Randolph has toured with Eric Clapton and been ranked one of the greatest guitarists of all time.  Other songs like “Shot of Love,” “If I Had My Way,” and “Walk Don’t Walk” Randolph’s sister offers sassy support.  

                  His band is not called “The Family Band” for nothing—three cousins are also members. 

“We Walk This Road” also offers a smoother, undulating version of John Lennon’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier.”  Lennon’s older and coarser version bursts with sporadic exclamations of horn and voice beside short guitar scratches.  Meanwhile, Randolph’s song is hammered together with the pulse of drums and sustained guitar riffs, giving it a cruising, acid-rock quality. 

                  Watching how Randolph’s band adds flesh and sinew to the “dry bones” of nearly forgotten blues is intriguing.  Impressively, the older songs lose none of their original force.  Instead, in “Traveling Shoes,” the locomotion of the original lyrics is kept alive through chugging drums and the unified chorus of the “Family Band.”  What roots music like Randolph helps listeners remember is that rock, rhythm and blues, and western music didn’t come from the head of Zeus, but from men in zuits.  And before them, these soulful melodies were harvested in gospel choirs, smoky night clubs, trains headed north in the Great Migration, and even earlier on Southern plantations.

                    Randolph’s own “House of God Church” has a tradition of pedal steel guitar.  He grew up in Essex County, New Jersey and watched older guitarists play during service.  Prohibited by his family from listening to anything but Christian music, the fifteen-year old Randolph began playing pedal steel tunes himself.  “When I was nineteen,” Randolph writes in his album insert, “I knew I wanted to take another path than the people who played traditional pedal steel to take it to a whole new level.”