Blues purists might be tempted to write him off as an imitator or a huckster, until it becomes apparent that this music is an integral part of who he is. Clad head-to-toe in immaculate white cotton, with black-accented bowtie and greased-back hair, he resembles a young Richard Widmark right off the set of a Hollywood noir. Onstage, Stoneking cuts an eccentric profile, to say the least. Three years later, he came out with Jungle Blues-a concept album that merged elements of hoodoo, vaudeville, old-time radio dramas, sea shanties, New Orleans-style ragtime, and even Appalachian bluegrass, all with a sizzling-hot horn section to top it off. He was barely 30 when he recorded 2005’s King Hokum, which, in songs like “Handyman Blues” and “She’s a Bread Baker,” captured the stark, haunted, and howling spirit that first drew him to the music of Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, and so many other heroes. He tried out the electric guitar and taught himself the banjo, but when he bought his 1931 National Duolian resonator, he had the sound-and the volume-he’d been seeking. Then there were aspects of it that I hunted down, and they led me into other types of music-things that had some parallels, like old calypso out of Trinidad, and a lot of old gospel records, too.” “I gradually got deeper and deeper into blues, and it pretty much became what I was into all the time. “I was hanging with different people, and some older guys who were musicians,” Stoneking recalls in his laid-back Aussie drawl. Along the way, in open rebellion against the ubiquity of late-’80s pop all around him, he’d so idealized and internalized the very idea of the Blues that he stumbled onto a signature all his own. His father’s record collection was an eclectic mix that ranged from early blues to classic ’50s gospel, inspiring the youngster to pick up a guitar, teach himself some songs, leave high school, and start busking on the streets of Sydney.
A small-town native of Australia’s remote Northern Territory, Stoneking grew up in a household that encouraged musical curiosity.
Fever visions of sweaty juke joints, late-night rent parties, and uptown nightclubs packed with lindy hoppers rise up from the black shellac grooves like heat from a Mississippi highway, invoking all the promises of mystery, romance, redemption, and revenge that have drawn blues players to the guitar for more than a century.īut this particular singer-songwriter isn’t just duplicating the sound and style of a bygone era. Drop a needle on a dusty old jazz or blues 78 from the ’40s, and you’ll get an inkling of how it feels to hear C.W.