Music review: Shemekia Copeland sings the blues ... and so much more

Music review: Shemekia Copeland sings the blues ... and so much more
02/25/2010
By Dan Emerson
TwinCities.com

Thirty-year-old vocalist Shemekia Copeland, who performed at the Dakota Jazz Club on Wednesday night, is widely considered the finest blues singer of her generation. Fifteen years into her professional career, she's also credited with helping sustain interest in what many consider an endangered art-form.

But Copeland, the daughter of the late Texas blues guitarist-singer Johnny Copeland, wisely decided early in her career to resist any efforts to confine her to the blues category.

As a result, her repertoire is rich with well-crafted original songs, embracing elements of the pop, rock, gospel and old-school soul music she listened to growing up in Harlem.

Much of her early set consisted of tunes from her 2009 CD "Never Goin' Back," which garnered several award nominations in the blues category. She kicked things off with the Al Green-style groove of "Sounds Like the Devil to Me," with guitarist Ken Scanlyn adding some bottleneck-slide counterpoints.

Copeland delved into alt-country territory with the emotive "Dirty Water," a tune by Nashville songwriters Buddy and Julie Miller. Keyboardist Jeremy Baum fleshed out the sound with some well-placed Hammond organ swells.

Copeland is a well-rounded vocalist with more polish than many of her blues-belting contemporaries, although she can certainly get gritty when the song calls for it.

She evoked the memory of her father with one of the late Texas bluesman's minor-key ballads, "My Own Tears."

She also
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showed her own knack for topical songwriting with the socially conscious ballad "Broken World," a tune she was inspired to write after a USO-sponsored trip to war-torn Iraq.

Another solid original was the forceful lament "Never Goin' Back to Memphis," which she co-wrote with her manager, John Hahn.

With her soaring, gospel-tinged vocals and blues-RB fusion, Copeland showed why she's been rightfully compared to the great Etta James. However, it may take her time to build an audience that transcends the blues category, given the daunting challenge of cracking restrictive radio playlists.

Speaking of radio, Copeland revisited one of her best early songwriting efforts: the sassy "Who Stole My Radio?" It laments the corporatization of commercial music-radio. The song has taken on added meaning, since Sirius Satellite Radio recently canceled the blues show Copeland had hosted for a couple of years.

For her encore, Copeland summoned some power chords from guitarist Arthur Neilson and got the house rocking with one of the first originals she recorded: "It's 2 a.m. (Do You Know Where Your Baby Is?)"

Dan Emerson is a freelance writer and musician in Minneapolis.