“Fun sticks to tape,” Jimbo Mathus is apt to say. And what could have been more fun, really, than the May 2024 session that rendered This Is Earnest “Guitar” Roy? Not only was it the first time Mathus had met the Clarksdale guitar legend but also the first real recording both in Music Maker’s new studio headquarters in Eastern North Carolina and with Mathus’ sharp backing band. At the start, Music Maker had even given Roy a car for more gigs across Mississippi. Could there be a better way to facilitate the fun that indeed sticks to these 10 tunes?
Mathus and Roy evenly split songwriting duties here, with Mathus lending the winking and lascivious “Sneaky on the Weekend” while Roy brought his hard-charging kiss-off “Earnestly.” It’s Roy’s guitar, though, that is always taking the star turn, whether slicing through the rhythm section of “Earnestly” like a blade or ripping through licks and across the boogie piano of “Going Out Swinging” as if bound for a dance hall that never closes. Roy is a Delta blues guitar scion, a junior to a father who taught Big Jack Johnson to play. But he learned, too, jazz and rock, plus how to write a solid hook. It’s all here at last on This Is Earnest “Guitar” Roy.
