Album review: You Can Always Turn Around by Lucky Peterson

by Michelle Parsons

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It’s an authentic, original rendition that’s born-and-bred American blues and soul, and there just plain isn’t enough of that anymore.

DALLAS — To speak properly on the subject of Lucky Peterson, you must know who and what he is. Peterson was a child prodigy in the mid-'60s. He could play four instruments, including blues guitar, organ, and trumpet – all before hitting puberty. He recorded a blues album before he was 10 years old. He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He played with the best blues musicians in history, like Willie Dixon, Little Milton, and Etta James.

Lucky Peterson is good.

It’s also no wonder his new album, You Can Always Turn Around, due out in late September on Dreyfus Records, is in direct relation to exactly just how “good” he is. (An understatement, perhaps.) His first album in seven years, Peterson’s record is chock-full of spine-tingling recreations of past blues and soul magic. He covers everything from a 1936 Robert Johnson standard to Ray LaMontagne’s commercialized “Trouble.” At 46 years old, the Dallas resident is one helluva guitar player, with a magnetic kind of sinewy warble that makes the 12-bar blues sound like a Bayou symphony.

And that’s just the start of it. He’s also spidery on the keys – it's a soul piano that bounces over octaves and flickers in ragtime. His voice is the other instrument that really brings to life these covers and standards on the album. The vocals wrap around the mic and perk the ear to hear all the stories and old school wisdoms he wails. Songs like “I’m New Here” and “Four Little Boy” inhabit a spoken word kind of story telling that Peterson electrifies with a gritty baritone.

“I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” originally written by Robert Johnson, is by far the best track on the album, and its opener. It’s that dirty kind of instrumentation that’s so raw, I felt compelled to stand up, crank up the volume, and bob my head with that hurts-so-good face. The lyrics are fun and at times nonsensical-yet-profound – a tried and true mark of a good blues tune.

Peterson is ground-breaking simply because he is exactly the kind of musical product that thrived 80 or 90 years ago on the South’s famous “Chitlin Circuit.” It’s an authentic, original rendition that’s born-and-bred American blues and soul, and there just plain isn’t enough of that anymore.

Overall, the gritty, jangly guitar spilling out of this record is what Peterson does best. Even though it’s been almost a decade since his last album, and during that time he fought and won a battle with drugs, he’s come home to a warm compilation that reflects on his trials. And he’s made the songs his own. Now living in Dallas and playing at local church Faith Memorial Baptist Church, he can focus on playing in the most soulful house of all.

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