Eclectic Company: Everything Old Is New Again — Hamilton Loomis Band

I have seen the future of music and his name is Hamilton Loomis. With his soft curls, new-fashioned sideburns and subtle goatee framing an elongated face and mobile mouth, this slight young Texas guitar and harmonica man wrings new changes out of the old familiar hit factory to spice up the majority of his show, in which he pilots his original love and life songs along a modern river of blues, funk, rock and soul with the insouciance and grace of a veteran thrice his age. When he brought his hot quartet featuring local tenor sax hero Stratton Doyle to Toucans a couple of weeks ago, the Thursday night crowd that braved the flooding rain were treated to hot licks, smart earthy lyrics, and some slow cover tune surprises that pulled couples out onto the dance floor in romantic harmony. Purest bliss.

When I was a kid half Loomis's age, I was a quietly intense fan of old blues masters from small Southern towns and sprawling Northern inner cities, who came to play their tradition-styled tunes mostly solo at summer folk festivals in the Northeast that were attended by earnest college kids and respectful older folks with left-wing politics who had been rent party attendees during the Great Depression. I saw most of the great living blues musicians then — Son House, Bukka White, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin' Wolf, Roosevelt Sykes, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — up close and personal on small stages under the hot August sun at the Newport and Philadelphia Folk festivals. The audiences at these affairs sat on the grass or on their own lawn chairs, dressed down in old beatnik and new hippie styles, while the musicians sat or stood on small stages, dressed to respect themselves in suits and Sunday clothes. Their performances were mesmerizing, their hot and sour songs were raw pain made pleasurable, and I could never get enough of them.

Then I grew up and saw some of these same performers in smoky New York City nightclubs and crammed concert halls, often opened for or accompanied by younger (mostly) white respectful junior journeymen, until one by one, the elderly graceful (mostly) black men died off, and were replaced with young white boys who diligently copied the songs and mannerisms of the performers they admired. For me, apart from a few younger admirers of the old blues men, like Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Larry Johnson and John Hammond, live performances of the blues devolved into over-amped rock shows in which narcissistic guitar and harmonica players shouted out their own names in self-congratulatory lyrics and spun out too many self-admiring instrumental choruses hanging themselves awkwardly on the simple 8- and 12-bar musical frames of the old blues.

I think I finally threw in the towel on modern blues shows at the star-studded opening of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale Mississippi in the mid-'80s, when ZZ Top presented the Museum with a check for a million bucks and a guitar made from a plank of the wooden shack that Muddy Waters had lived in when he drove tractor on the Dockery family plantation. It was a day of blatant contrasts. That afternoon and evening, I heard some of the best blues I would ever hear, by local musicians playing joyfully for the enthusiastic locals at the catfish fry, while the rest of the members of the national press followed the short bearded internationally famous men who didn't deign to strap on their instruments or to play a single musical lick. Talk about the blues. That was one ironic blues day.

And then I heard Hamilton Loomis, who captured all my attention when he sang his fresh new lyrics on old themes and powered his electric guitar with an inner intensity and an outward cool, producing an orchestra of sounds and stories that flooded my senses. Damn, man, it's the blues. Old made new again. Taking down pleasing lyric lines that caught my ear, I couldn't actually keep up as Loomis sang them: "I got a voodoo doll baby /yes I do /sure is strange how much it looks like you/give me comfort from the madness that you put me through…" (Voodoo Doll); "I've told you lies / but I've known /that the only one I'm fooling is me…I wanna be a better man /and I do the best I can /to give my love to you…" (Better Man); "She ain't got much for looks /she burns everything she cooks /she ain't real statuesque /she got no taste for a dress…she can't carry a tune /I can't stand her perfume…but that don't mean a thing /she got me hanging by a string /cause she got that thang…" (That Thang).

At the end of the set, featuring a challenge duet of guitar/harmonica versus saxophone, and which ranged over the stage, dance floor, length of the bar, and ended with Loomis and Doyle balanced on the rims of some scenic urns, I had to buy "Aint Just Temporary," Loomis's most recent Blind Pig Records release. It's been revolving in my car ever since.

You can read about Loomis's pedigreed roots and history on his own website (hamiltonloomis.com) or on the record company's site (blindpigrecords.com) and you can buy his releases through either. As one of his famous musical mentors, Bo Diddley, has famously said: "You got to put some seasonin' in what you're doin', and this boy's got the whole salt shaker!" You can hear Bo Diddley's "unmistakable voice and funky tremolo guitar" playing on the "You Got To Wait," the song he co-wrote for the "Ain't Just Temporary" album, but you'll have to wait until May or later to see and hear Hamilton Loomis live. He's in England, tearing up and down the country, where he's already a big star. He's going to be a big wheel here someday too. Just remember you heard it from me first.