Muddy Gurdy

Oh, boy. Just when you start thinking you’ve heard everything, somebody comes out of left field—or in this case la rive gauche—with a new angle on an old and familiar format. French trio Hypnotic Wheels—Tia Gouttebel, guitar; Gilles Chabenat, hurdy-gurdy; Marco Glomeau, percussion—uses a hurdy-gurdy as a second guitar that’s linked their traditional French music to north Mississippi hill country blues. What’s a hurdy-gurdy, you ask? Good question. The band’s PR describes it thusly: “a classic hand-cranked, stringed instrument which is a kind of string section in a box.” For Muddy Gurdy, the band went to Mississippi and hooked up with some descendants of hill country blues legends. Cedric Burnside, R.L. Burnside’s grandson, delivers a rousing version of his elder’s “See My Jumper Hanging on the Line” and the Muddy Waters classic “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” Shardé Thomas sings and invokes the shade of her grandfather, Otha Turner, by playing fife on “Glory Glory Hallelujah” that’s made especially haunting by the hurdy-gurdy, which is the perfect instrument for these hypnotic, one-chord blues. This CD is a real treasure of whose riches I can only mention a few.