"Blues Keep Chasin' Me"
Kenny Neal is ready to take his place in the new old guard of Southern Blues
Buddy Guy, the eighty-six-year-old blues star from Pointe Coupée Parish, is embarking on his final tour this month. As the eight-time Grammy winner’s road retirement looms, the question arises—who’s going to fill the mighty bluesman’s shoes?
Some rising young stars are staking territory. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, a popular twenty-three-year-old singer-guitarist from Clarksdale, Mississippi, has already won his first Grammy Award. Jontavious Willis, a twenty-seven-year-old country-blues artist from Greenville, Georgia, earned a Grammy nomination for his second album. And the New Orleans-based Samantha Fish, a thirty-three-year-old singer-guitarist originally from Kansas City, Missouri, keeps moving from strength to strength.
In between Guy’s generation and these new artists, though, is Baton Rouge’s Kenny Neal. A vigorous sixty-five-year-old, he’s simultaneously enjoying his musical prime while serving as a soulful torchbearer for the blues artists who preceded him. This lineage includes Neal’s late father, Raful Neal, a singer-harmonica player from West Baton Rouge Parish who was a contemporary of Guy, Slim Harpo, Henry Gray, Tabby Thomas, and other Louisiana blues notables.
Even after Neal’s eighteen albums, dozens of awards, international tours, and Grammy nomination for his 2016 album, Bloodline—he’s still hungry. And he possesses the rare combination of knowledge, experience, and artistry necessary to occupy a larger place in the blues world. Neal is “trying to get to the next slot, where Buddy Guy is leaving, if they need somebody in that spot,” he said.
Like his father, Neal is a singer, harmonica player, and songwriter steeped in his native swamp blues. He’s also a master guitarist and a producer; his Brookstown Recording Studio, built in November 2018, and music label Booga Music have produced records for Tito Jackson from the Jackson 5; South Korean-American singer-pianist Hanna PK; the Buffalo, New York-based blues singer Patti Parks; the late, great Lazy Lester; Eddie Levert; Guitar Shorty; Bobby Rush; Jovin Webb; and others.
The first of Raful and Shirley Neal’s ten musical children, Neal was born October 14, 1957 at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. In that pre-I-10 era, Neal’s parents drove their Oldsmobile Rocket 88 from their home in Erwinville to New Orleans, barely reaching the hospital in time for his birth—a “hallway baby,” as he put it. Growing up in rural Erwinville, Neal was naturally drawn to music. “I would crawl up on my dad’s knees when he and James (Johnson) and Rudolph (Richard) (and plenty others) were at the house rehearsing, and stand there and jam to the music,” he said.
Raful gave his precocious oldest son a rich foundation in life and music. “My dad always taught me about respect,” he said, “and treating people the way you want to be treated. Everybody is somebody.”
Neal began performing early, earning tips at six years old during his dad’s Saturday matinée gigs—during which he’d imitate James Brown and dance the Watusi, mashed potato, and Sputnik. “When I danced on the bar, all of the grownups thought I was adorable,” he recalled. “They’d bring me to their table and put a dollar in my pocket. When I left the show, I had four pockets full of money.”
Neal joined his dad’s band at thirteen, replacing a bass player who was chronically late for engagements. “My dad said, ‘Can you play these tunes?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, grab that bass.’ I kicked off with them, because I had been practicing around the house. When I played that first night, that was it for the old bass player. I had the job.”
Though Neal’s father’s legacy looms large, it was actually Guy who inspired him to start songwriting. “I thought I could do them better.” After six or seven years spent playing in his dad’s band, at age nineteen, Neal left home to play bass in Guy’s Chicago-based band, kickstarting a journeyman era that ultimately convinced him to step from the shadows and become, like Guy and his father, a frontman. “Because the bass wasn’t gonna get it,” Neal remembered, “I started writing my own songs and learning how to play the guitar, so I could be a band leader. I followed that dream.”
"I'm trying to get to the next slot, where Buddy Guy is leaving, if they need somebody in that spot." —Kenny Neal
That steppingstone gig lasted until the late seventies, when the blues business took a dive. “The music had died out, so Buddy wasn’t working as much,” Neal said. Around this time, he was living in Toronto and had started a family. Around 1980, “I went back to Baton Rouge and got my little brothers and took them to Canada.”
Neal’s partnership in the Neal Brothers Blues Band—which included Larry, Ronnie, Noel and Lil’ Ray Neal—lasted about a year. They scored a house gig at the Isabella Hotel in downtown Toronto, and would frequently bring in musicians like Guy, Sunnyland Slim, Big Mama Thornton, and others to play with the Neal Brothers. “When that first winter hit Canada, they hauled back to Baton Rouge,” Neal recalled. “And I was stuck with all those publicity photos and posters because I didn’t have the Neal Brothers Band to promote. We looked like the Jackson 5 on that poster. I said, ‘I’ll never do this again. I’m going to go under Kenny Neal for the rest of my life.’ ”
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Neal reached a milestone in 1987 when Florida’s King Snake Records released his solo album debut, Kenny Neal: Bio on the Bayou. Chicago’s Alligator Records re-released the album in 1988 with a new title, Big News from Baton Rouge! Over the next six years, he released four more Alligator albums, followed by a succession of recordings on the Telarc, Blind Pig, and Cleopatra labels. In 2022, the German label Ruf Records issued album number eighteen, Straight from the Heart. It’s Neal’s first solo release from Ruf, first self produced album, and first recording made in Baton Rouge at Brookstown. “On my home turf, with my own musicians,” he said.
Going for downhome authenticity, Neal hired musicians from Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and New Orleans for the Straight from the Heart sessions. His inspiration for the album included his father and other Baton Rouge blues musicians, especially James Johnson and Rudy Richard, as well as New Orleans rhythm-and-blues stars Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe and Johnny Adams.
“When I was in here in my studio,” Neal said during an interview held in the control room, “I just relaxed and thought about the music they played when I was a kid. That goes for the whole album.”
Straight from the Heart features an all-star cast of guests. Tito Jackson and Neal’s daughter, Syreeta, sing together for the sizzling “Two Timing.” “Kingfish” Ingram joins Neal for a soaring tribute to B.B. King, “Mount Up on the Wings of the King.” Baton Rouge pianist Darrell Jefferson adds his gospel touch to “Someone, Somewhere,” a Little Junior Parker song that Jefferson once performed live with Raful Neal. And Rockin’ Dopsie Jr., Dwayne Dopsie, Anthony Dopsie, Big Nate Williams, Lee Allen Zeno, and Kevin Menard douse two songs—“Bon Temps Rouler” and “Louise Ana”—in Zydeco sauce.
Rising from two years of COVID-spawned inactivity, Neal began playing gigs again last spring, one of them being his twenty-eighth appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. “We finally got a chance to do it again, and it was beautiful out there.”
In 2022, Neal also appeared at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis, Live After Five in Baton Rouge, and, one of his favorites, the Crescent City Blues and Barbecue Festival. Those gigs were warmups for 2023, which began in January with the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“I probably won’t see much of Louisiana in 2023,” the ready-to-roll Neal admitted. “It’s going to be like that.”