There is this tired old cliché that reads something along the lines that, “To play the blues you have had to have had the blues.” Of course that would make every human being on the planet a blues musician and of course that is clearly not the case. However, without getting into any graphic detail, Ron Thompson is where the blues has taken up residence for the past forty plus years.

On Son of Boogie Woogie the blues explodes out of Ron Thompson like a dormant volcano which one day decided to blow its top. Like a lava flow, Thompson’s approach here is relentless, dangerous and slow. He has found that virtuosity doesn’t have anything to do with speed. In fact the opposite is true and on Son of Boogie Woogie he proves it.

This CD on Little Village Records is a twelve song, fifty four minute journey into the world of straight ahead, low down, gut bucket blues at its finest. It is blues which is so funky, the entire record smells like the Pall Mall stained curtains in the room of a faded glory motel on route 25, just outside of Hollister.

This CD lives in the moment. It is an aural snapshot of barely harnessed emotion, soul and energy. It is a single performance which only sounded this way once. For point of reference, upon my first listen, much of the CD sounded like Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers if Brewer Phillips played a Hammond B3 and a piano.

Listen again and again, which you will undoubtedly do, and you realize that the guitar of Ron Thompson speaks to a wide blues spectrogram. You will hear lots of electric slide guitar in the spirit of Elmore James, Robert Nighthawk, Hop Wilson, the great work that Earl Hooker did with organist Johnny “Big Moose” Walker as well as the aforementioned Taylor. Beyond the famous slide guitar influences you will also hear Thompson quoting everything from T-Bone Walker to John Lee Hooker and others. It all is filtered through Thompson’s own edgy muse.

Thompson is also an effective singer who has that rare ability to deliver his message in a very personalized, direct manner, sans the overwrought histrionics which often mar the interpretation of this type of material. 

Son of Boogie Woogie features the album’s Executive Producer, Jim Pugh, via his Hammond B3 and piano, which are all over the record. His contributions here are indispensable and act as the perfect foil to Thompson’s attack on his guitar. Drummers Scott Griffin and D’mar play on various tracks. That’s it. Yet they coax a full sound out of this spare instrumentation without studio overdubs or gimmicks. The entire album was produced and recorded by Kid Andersen at his Greaseland Studios in San Jose, California.

Ron Thompson has toiled in the blues field for parts of the last five decades. Son of Boogie Woogie is hands down his finest recording to date and represents his career defining masterwork.

- David Mac