Taj Mahal Free MP3, Song Download, Lyrics, Album Track List

Taj Mahal

PLAY
QUEUE

Play Taj Mahal

Song	Lyrics	Save	Buy
PLAY QUEUE 1 Leaving Trunk		save
PLAY QUEUE 2 Statesboro Blues		save
PLAY QUEUE 3 Checkin' Up On My Baby		save
PLAY QUEUE 4 Everybody's Got To Change Sometime		save
PLAY QUEUE 5 E Z Rider		save
PLAY QUEUE 6 Dust My Broom		save
PLAY QUEUE 7 Diving Duck Blues		save
PLAY QUEUE 8 Celebrated Walkin' Blues		save

MOG Editorial Review

Emerging on the tail end of the blues renaissance in the '60s, Taj Mahal used youth to his advantage to create a hybrid between blues and rock that felt natural rather than forced. Plenty of the strumming and traditional vocal inflections from the blues are heard throughout, but Mahal also naturally shifts back and forth between that sound and the sort of blues-inflected rock that the Rolling Stones had worked so hard to perfect in the same decade. It showed Mahal as the product of a new blues generation rather than the old guard trying to learn new tricks, which is part of the charm on a rock-leaning cut like the Mahal-penned "EZ Rider." By the time Mahal closes with his take on standard "The Celebrated Walkin' Blues," it's obvious that he'd grown into an exciting force on this record simply by being himself.
AMG Review of Taj Mahal

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

Taj Mahal's debut album was a startling statement in its time and has held up remarkably well. Recorded in August of 1967, it was as hard and exciting a mix of old and new blues sounds as surfaced on record in a year when even a lot of veteran blues artists (mostly at the insistence of their record labels) started turning toward psychedelia. The guitar virtuosity, embodied in Taj Mahal's slide work (which had the subtlety of a classical performance), Jesse Ed Davis's lead playing, and rhythm work by Ry Cooder and Bill Boatman, is of the neatly stripped-down variety that was alien to most records aiming for popular appeal, and the singer himself approached the music with a startling mix of authenticity and youthful enthusiasm. The whole record is a strange and compelling amalgam of stylistic and technical achievements -- filled with blues influences of the 1930s and 1940s, but also making use of stereo sound separation and the best recording technology. The result was numbers like Sleepy John Estes' "Diving Duck Blues," with textures resembling the mix on the early Cream albums, while "The Celebrated Walkin' Blues" (even with Cooder's animated mandolin weaving its spell on one side of the stereo mix) has the sound of a late '40s Chess release by Muddy Waters. Blind Willie McTell ("Statesboro Blues") and Robert Johnson ("Dust My Broom") are also represented, in what had to be one of the most quietly, defiantly iconoclastic records of 1968.