The Best of Guitar Shorty - The Long and the Short of It

 

Another library grab, Guitar Shorty has been known to me by name, but I was not familiar with his music. Unfortunately, this is not a super strong selection of tunes and if this collects his "greatest hits", I'm afraid that it is not too surprising that he isn't more of a household name.

While I cannot fault his guitar playing, the songs themselves are just not strong contenders and tend to try to blend styles - I assume in the hopes of crossover success, but they turn out to be inferior in any genre. When Shorty just plays some blues guitar, his tone and style is not very different from some other great bluesmen, such as the three Kings (BB, Albert and Freddie) but, as I said, the songs try to do more than "just" sing the blues and the addition of soul'n'pop styles into the mix just dilute the whole feel and kinda fall flat.

Once again, I'm sad to say that this was not as good as I had hoped. Again, while not all bad by any means, there's not enough real songwriting here so I can't recommend this one.