Stacy Mitchart - Printers Alley (2021) [CD Rip]

The Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar, 220 Printers Alley, Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the hippest blues club addresses in Music City USA, with a considerable draw for music enthusiasts from all over the world. In the 26 years of its existence, one musician in particular has decisively shaped the reputation of the “blues stage”: Stacy Mitchhart.

The now 62-year-old recorded his long player "Live at Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar, March 5th, 1997" there at the beginning of his career. Now he is dedicating another special album to the blues institution on the Cumberland River with “Printers Alley”. With 15 pieces, the current studio work comprises a review of Mitchhart's blues history, which actually began in Cincinnati, Ohio, and with role models such as Freddie King, Carlos Santana and BB King.

“Printers Alley” reflects this path right at the beginning: on “The Only Thing Missing” and “She Knows What To Do”, the Stacy Mitchhart Band shows their blues-rock side; and that is only a small part of the great musical diversity of this blues formation. Songwriter, lead guitarist, singer and band leader Stacy Mitchhart produced all the songs and describes in detail the background and information for each track in the booklet.

From the soul blues of the 1960s (“Homewrecker” and “Something So Wrong”) to the classic soul title “You Turn Me On” - The Temptations “greet” The Miracles! - up to jazzy versions ("I Might Be Your Husband" and "Why Did She Have To Leave") in the swinging Sade style, the album offers more than a cross-section of the band's bluesy stage years. The big band sound of the tracks “Shake” and “What I Feel” should definitely not be ignored.

As one of the top five live acts in Nashville's club scene, the Stacy Mitchhart Band plays up to 200 gigs a year - also as a house band at the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar. "Blues Doctor" Mitchhart won the 2003 Albert King-Most Promising Guitarist Award and proves this promising honor not only with the acoustic "doghouse blues" in jug band style and outstanding slide abilities in "Live My Life", but also very impressively masters the long guitar part in "Worried Mind Blues". Mitchhart, in his own view, "a Yankee in Nashville playing the blues",closes the long player with a cover version of the “Basin Street Blues (1928) - which Louis Armstrong made inimitably famous - as a bow to the sound of New Orleans and in its own way thanks for the many influences of the jazz metropolis.

“Printers Alley” by Stacy Mitchhart is an impressive production by a blues enthusiast “all-rounder” who has found his home in Music City and, despite 16 long players, unfortunately has hardly received any attention in this country. Mitchhart's retrospective on his blues history and two decades in “Printers Alley” conveys a successful retrospective in 70 minutes, a “bluesy” synonym for a musical life's achievement.