Anatomy texts might not show it, but the greatest soul and blues music leaves no doubt that the hip bone is directly connected to the heart -- a fact that’s driven home in every note laid down by Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. As they prove on their Lost Highway debut, Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is, the Austin-based combo has the kind of gritty attitude and deliciously greasy groove-consciousness that’d pass muster in the toughest juke joint.
To paraphrase Ike and Tina Turner, Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is gives Lewis the chance to play nice and easy as well as nice and rough. He and his bandmates take the latter route more often -- as on the fiery, brass-laced opener “Gunpowder” and the unabashedly horndog anthem “Big Booty Woman.” But there’s far more than one trick up their collective sleeve, as borne out by the dark New Orleans march “Master Sold My Baby.”
“It’s weird…people say I come up with all these different kinds of songs, and I guess that’s true, but they all just come out naturally,” says Lewis, who cites James Brown and Lightnin’ Hopkins as two of his bigger influences. “If I sit down and try to write a song, it just sounds contrived. All the songs on this record, I just made up as I went along. I couldn’t do a lot of ‘em again if I didn’t have ‘em on tape.”
That from-the-gut stream-of-consciousness permeates the disc, with Lewis wailing wildly -- in a voice that’s one part Joe Tex, one part Tyrone Davis -- through sweat-soaked offerings like the gutbucket “I’m Broke” and “Please, Part Two” as his bandmates turn up the heat, taking a low simmer to a full boil with turn-on-a-dime precision.