To show both respect and allegiance for the great city of New Orleans & the Super Bowl-bound New Orleans Saints, Brother Dege (aka Dege Legg from the Louisiana-based bands Santeria and Black Bayou Construkt) is offering his new song "The Battle of New Orleans" as a free mp3 download. This harrowing, stripped-down Delta-blues track was inspired by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and is from his forthcoming solo full-length Folk Songs Of The American Longhair (out Feb. 16th through Golarwash Labs and Records). MP3
Get ready for some raw dirt, railroad pounding, swamp-fried, Louisiana-meets-the-Mekong Delta blues music. This aint no cowboy chording blues cheese. This is the REAL deal. Dege Legg (aka Brother Dege), the Cajun born and Louisiana raised leader of the band Santeria, is about to release his highly anticipated slide/Dobro record entitled Folk Songs Of The American Longhair, co-produced by 4x Grammy-winner Tony Daigle (Dr. John, Sonny Landreth, Gatemouth Brown, Bobby Charles, etc) and Santeria lead-guitarist Primo.
Legg composed ten original tunes in the slide-Delta tradition, painstakingly paying tribute to the old masters while tossing all purist, karaoke-like tendencies to the wind. Think Son House meets Leonard Cohen at a hoodoo sιance in the swamps. Slide players from the U.S. to Europe are already covering the tunes - and the record isn't even out yet - via a series of live Brother Dege youtube videos which have garnered over 150,000 plays with no promotional hype or jive.
Much like the field recordings of Alan Lomax, the record tunnels into the ancient mysteries of pre-war blues and the devil-obsessed masters. Recorded in sheds, old houses and open fields for maximum intensity. Theres minimal instrumentation on this thing. In a return to the unprocessed basics, almost all of the tracks feature only one vocal, one slide guitar and one foot stomping. Thats it. Listeners are in for a treat when they hear how the music sounds, writhing about in the echo chamber of reality when stripped of all the studio trickery of the past decade.
