Delta Generators are on a roll

“It feels great,” said lead singer Craig Rawding. “It’s very validating. We make music for ourselves that we would want to hear that we enjoy playing, whatever we’re feeling in our souls when we sit down to write this stuff, and we hope that other people enjoy it.”

Hard River To Row is only the band’s second CD and their first full-length. Their 20008 CD Devil In The Rhythm was a nine track that also went over well with critics and fans. Delta Generators play a lot of vintage style blues music with their own twist, usually from other roots genres. Bass player Rick O’Neal describes its vibe: “It’s definitely rooted in a Delta blues tradition but an electrified Delta blues with some modern stamp on it. We tend to drift around into some Louisiana funky stuff, some Memphis soul, and we pick up some elements of early 50s rock and roll too.”

Rawding said the new CD has been more difficult to define as it has R&B influences with a lot of blues slide guitar, a modern touch in the lyrics, and its rock and roll attitude. “A few tracks touch on soul, and funk, and gospel, but we try to keep it within the confines of the blues genre so we wouldn’t confuse people too much,” Rawding said.

Listening to Delta Generators might be challenging to blues purists. “We keep it authentic,” Rawding said, “as far as instrumentation and sound of it but the modern part of it would be some of the lyrics and some of the attitude. I think we play harder and grittier than a lot of the real retro blues bands.”

Bass player Rick O’Neal, who plays in the band along with his brother/guitarist Charlie O’Neal had a similar take on the purist issue.

Rawding said that blues purists might not like his band but that he and his band mates must stay true to what is in their hearts. He said if he played strictly Chicago blues, he would feel like he was playing in a tribute band. “For us, I think that would get a little old after a while. It’s almost like when you do that the music becomes dead in a way because you’re not adding anything new to it.”

His bass player holds no grudges either. “I have to respect their passion to preserve the tradition,” O’Neal said. “I’d want to make them realize that we try and preserve the blues of the past while carrying it into the next millennium. We don’t abandon traditional blues. We don’t stray so far from it that it’s not recognizable, but rather we try to give it our own sound and introduce it to a new audience.”

Rawding grew up with so many different genres in his generation that he really can’t write what some would call pure blues. “I might be feeling Albert King. I might be feeling a little bit of Howlin’ Wolf. Then, The Doors might jump into it. I might grab a little bit from Stax/Volt. I might be feeling a little Otis Redding on a tune, even if it’s a slide blues guitar song.”

Rawding isn’t offended that some blues DJs or some blues music journalists might dismiss his band if they find the Delta Generators less than pure blues. “I don’t want to judge them. I don’t feel anything negative toward them,” he said. “I do wish that people would at least listen to it and give it a chance. If somebody has a blues program, and their listeners only want to hear blues from the 50s and 60s, I could see that maybe that it would be a little bit jarring for them to suddenly throw one of our tunes on there. I also think that if they listen through both of those CDs they would definitely find two or three or four songs that would fit on a real traditional blues show.”

The live show is where Delta Generators really get to show off their chops. They are already known for their high energy performances. The band gets good responses at their live shows to “Hand Me Down Blues,” “Strawdog Strut,” and “That Evil” from the first CD, as they’re all raucous blues slide guitar workouts. From the new CD Hard River To Row, the title track and “Coming Home” get the best response.

“People just love Charlie’s slide playing,” Rawding said. “A lot of times when we write a slide blues tune, it does tend to be a pretty adrenaline pumping song. Some of the songs we have that are somewhat soul, R&B oriented, like ‘Hard River To Row’ also go over big. That song has a little bit of a Hi Records Memphis soul. Those tunes get people dancing.”

The biggest response Delta Generators get live is from their song “Way Down” that is not on either CD. It’s a slow groove with an extended blues guitar solo. “It’s good for my ego to get that little check. This is a blues band. You’ve got a good voice, buddy. But people are here to hear that guitar solo,” Rawding said, with self-deprecating humor.

Delta Generators get good responses to their covers as well as their originals. “There’s probably some real blues purists that will be able to (identify the songwriter) but I think most people just hear….except for ‘Crossroads’ and ‘One Way Out‘…tunes that they know from classic rock bands covering them…I think a lot of these songs they don’t even know which is an original and which is a cover. I think they’re just responding to the sound of that genre in general and the way that we play it.”

Remember, Delta Generators formed as recently as 2007. It was the 2008 Boston Blues Challenge that suddenly made them household names. Playing the White Mountain Boogie And Blues Festival and Heather Fest a few weeks later didn’t hurt either. Making the top ten in Memphis a few months later earned them more respect back home in Boston.

In Memphis, they got through a final preliminary round, and they were hanging out in a bar somewhere on Beale Street getting buzzed and having a good time when they found out they had placed in the top ten. “We did seem to get a lot more attention and a lot more fans and a lot more gigs,” Rawding said. “Maybe that would’ve happened any way at that point because we had been playing for a year. It boosted our confidence as a band. It boosted people’s interest. It helps a band just to have something to even talk about.” The stamp of approval from Blues Foundation and the International Blues Competition may have convinced “purists” to give them a listen.

“Placing in the final in Memphis definitely gave a boost to the profile of the band,” O’Neal said, “and continuing to do things like the Independent Music Awards named Devil In The Rhythm in the Best Blues Album category in their Vox Populi.” Vox Populi is what the IMA call their public voting system. Boston Phoenix nominated Delta Generators Best R&B Band and Worcester Magazine named them Best Blues Band.

Delta Generators play out all over the northeast. They played a blues train in Cooperstown New York and they are known all over New England. A nationwide radio promo will begin this month. If the band gets a decent amount of air play on college radio and blues station they might tour.

Rawding came to the blues sound after fronting his originals’ band Vibrotica and a U2 tribute band The Joshua Tree. The singer said he learned to sing the blues by singing along to old records and learning all of the subtle nuances. Adding his own personal elements and touches makes it his own version of that genre in his own songs.

As a 15 year old Rawding was singing the music of the 1960s, The Doors, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. His first club band had a young bass player who admonished the band that they had to play soul, R&B, and blues if they wanted to make money playing. “You guys can put down your Foghat records and listen to some of this stuff,” the kid had said. That’s when a new sunrise had dawned on Rawding.

“I just became obsessed with it,” the singer said. “I listened to Freddie King and Albert King and Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf and then started listening to Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Honestly, doing this now after Vibrotica is me coming full circle. The stuff that I’m doing with Delta Generators is close to what I was doing when I first started playing in clubs back when I was 21.”

O’Neal, who had played with the funk outfit Evan Goodrow Band for a while, said the Delta Generators was seeded in an interest that grew. “I was leaving Evan Goodrow Band to play more full time with Charlie and Jeff in our side project called O’Neal-Armstrong. I thought this blues thing would be a fun thing to do on the side. Little did I know that it would actually take over as the main gig.” O’Neal grew up on classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and AC/DC that he found were all blues based so it only made sense to him to dig into the roots of that music.

Delta Generators have a strong chemistry between the four band members. Rawding said it might come from Charlie and Rick being brothers and working with Jeff for a long time. “We all listen to each other. We respect each other. Nobody steps on each other’s toes. There’s no weak link.”

O’Neal does give some due to the brother chemistry, having always played well together, dating back to their youth working with Ben Orr from the cars. “Jeff Armstrong—the drummer—is a guy that we’ve been playing with. We’ve been doing some side work with him for years. The reason we started working with him is the chemistry we feel between the three of us. Craig was late to that union, but he was like the missing fourth piece. He was the voice and the person who could keep up with that chemistry and plug in and bring it to the next level. He was the guy we’d been waiting for because we’d been playing together for five years and when Craig came into the picture it was immediately clear that this was going to be a great band.”

Rawding is the band’s lyricist. Like most songwriters he finds his inspiration in every day life. “It’s things in my life that I go through and I feel, fears and disappointments, and joys, and everything that human beings go through, and it just gets filtered through my heart and into my brain and it comes out onto the page. The best songs are the ones that come in five minutes and the whole thing’s done. Then there’s other songs where three or four lines come right away, and you sort of craft it around that. Sometimes I don’t even know what the song is about right away.”

The singer/lyricist does not get intimidated by the daunting task of living up to the blues legends of yesteryears. “I try not think about it because it could drive me crazy,” Rawding said. “We try to tow the line between not going too far out of the genre that it doesn’t make sense any more, but also be able to add something of my own to it.” The new title track Hard River To Row is his favorite song on the new CD. “I think it works as a blues song but also it encompasses R&B styles. There’s definitely some Memphis soul. I think it’s as strong as anything on Devil In The Rhythm but it’s a completely different style of blues.”

Delta Generators have an interesting song on the new CD called “Canebrake.” The word is an English noun that means an area of land with thick cane, sugar cane, exotic bamboo or similar plant material. It also refers to a historical region of west-central Alabama that was once dominated by thickets of bamboo cane. The cane began to disappear with the large scale arrival of white settlers who fought in the creek wars. The newcomers planted crops that replaced the native cane. Species that would have normally been kept in check by the cane overtook the natural setting.

“I thought it was interesting that this natural sugar cane as soon as the white settlers came they just fucking destroyed it,” Rawding said. “The idea of before that happening the people who lived in that area just threw a wild, hedonistic party out in the canebrake.”

Another new song “Reverend’s Daughter” is not autobiographical but was inspired by the old farmer’s daughter joke. “It’s the idea of the guy who’s this real strict, bible-thumping, fire and brimstone preacher in town that maybe that his daughter might be a wild cat,” Rawding said. “That’s one of my more traditional style blues lyrics. I didn’t know a reverend’s daughter first hand.”