Love and booze

Richard Smerin holds the Kulturforum audience spellbound

"It’s hard to make big money singing the blues. It takes years and years, and the jerks still keep asking ‘Who the hell is that?’" Muddy Water’s words apply to many blues singers, both black and white. But English blues singer Richard Smerin is no longer an unknown quantity in Fürth.

He has been living here for many months and has made a name for himself well beyond the local area through extensive tours and gigs. It was no surprise that an audience of over a hundred people came to hear him live at the Schlachthof Kulturforum.

The 37-year-old blues guitarist’s playing reminds you at its best of Lightnin’ Hopkins or Howling Wolf. As his left foot pounds out the rhythm, Smerin gives us a mixture of traditional blues numbers and his own compositions on the dobro and steel string guitar. Many of the stories he tells are standard to the blues repertoire, but they come across as the stuff of personal experience. Lost love, a bottle of booze on the table, and the devil breathing down your neck.

"You can tell he’s been through a lot," a member of the audience was heard to comment. That life experience is reflected in his performance. When Smerin moves from blues to a finger-picking folk style, the emphasis is still on the story. He has no need for easy effects. It’s his fluent playing that creates the mood. His versions of "Cocaine" and "House of the Rising Sun" engrave themselves in your memory, like his rendering of "Death don’t have no mercy in this land".

Sure, like many other bluesmen, Richard Smerin will not be making any big money with his acoustic blues guitar. But after this fantastic concert, he deserves to have his name on everyone’s lips. And if Captain Beefheart ever decided to return from his self-imposed exile and get a new band together, the following contact address would be a pretty good tip.

Oliver Hübner