The singers who last blues bards, country music storytellers and true jazz vocalists tell stories of real life: loss, longing, fulfillment, and the irrepressible determination to keep on keeping on. They also have a saving wit, like in the venerable blues lyric: Im gonna lay my head on the railroad track and when the train comes, Im gonna yank it back. Delbert McClinton embodies these qualities of what I call the life force of music as in this new session, Cost of Living, on which he wrote or co-wrote all of thesemore

The singers who last blues bards, country music storytellers and true jazz vocalists tell stories of real life: loss, longing, fulfillment, and the irrepressible determination to keep on keeping on. They also have a saving wit, like in the venerable blues lyric: Im gonna lay my head on the railroad track and when the train comes, Im gonna yank it back. Delbert McClinton embodies these qualities of what I call the life force of music as in this new session, Cost of Living, on which he wrote or co-wrote all of these songs of what he calls days in the life. (The one exception is Jimmy Reeds Ill Change My Style. In a Wall Street Journal article I wrote about him years ago, Lone Star Troubadour, I told of the first time I heard him singing in a club, the blues, rhythm and blues, rock and honky-tonk country songs for nearly two hours without stopping and without repeating himself.