Search - Loren Connors :: Curse of Midnight Mary (Dig)

"His translations of the Delta blues and his more recent application of those spectral tones to pointillist atmospheres evoke things distant but uncomfortably familiar." -- Pitchfork In 1981 guitarist Loren Connors took his tape recorder to the Connecticut graveyard where the legendary Midnight Mary's grave lies. The curse: anyone caught in her graveyard past midnight will die the next day. But Connors taped in that place and made this album, which was lost and forgotten until 2008. Recorded between his eight-volume Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations LPs and the folk albums he would make with Tom Hanford and Kath Bloom, these nine pieces meld those two forms. Connors, singing in a trancelike moan, reforms the Mississippi Delta blues on his acoustic guitar with flashes of melodic hooks and a percussive guitar style that erupts into boogie-woogie riffs and other world spirituals. A rare and essential peek into the mysterious early years of the American guitar master.