Precious Bryant

• The Truth [Terminus, 2004] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

The Truth [Terminus, 2004]
Bryant was news to me when Adia Victoria turned the title song of this 2004 album into a quietly sassy highlight of Jason Isbell's Georgia Blue project, whereupon I streamed it twice and obtained it while the obtaining was good. Call her "Piedmont blues," indicating less showy guitar and vocals than the Texas much less Delta variants--cf. ragtime finger-picker Blind Blake, North Carolina conjunctivitis casualty Blind Boy Fuller, Folkways stalwart Brownie McGhee, and self-made sophisticate Josh White. Bryant herself was born in 1942 to a sharecropping family near Georgia's Alabama line, where she resided till she died at 71. A musician all her life, she only began to tour when she was 41, and followed the debut album she finally recorded at 60 with this simple, definitive band session two years later. Bryant's guitar is deft but not much more--what puts her music across is the unaffected directness of her singing and the unpretentious range of her writing. The flat declaratives of the title song are powered by quiet conviction: "I said I told my baby/That afternoon/That if you mistreat me/You'll be leaving soon." Spectacular this satisfying album definitely isn't. It would ruin the effect if that was any kind of goal. A-