Guy Davis & Fabrizio Poggi ‎– Sonny & Brownie's Last Train (2017)

Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi team up to deliver an aural love letter to two of their personal favorites, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on this delightful collection album, dramatically reviving the memory of two of the greatest acoustic bluesmen and longest enduring musical partners the world has ever known.A master craftsman in the Piedmont style of blues harmonica, Terry was born in Georgia, grew up in the vicinity of Raleigh, N.C., and went blind as a teenager. He rose to prominence in 1938 when he was invited by John Hammond to participate in the legendary From Spirituals To Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, the two-day event that introduced the blues – along with Big Joe Turner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimmy Rushing, Big Bill Broonzy and others – to white society for the first time. He was a Broadway star, too, appearing in 1947 in the long-running play, Finnian’s Rainbow. A native of Knoxville, Tenn., and stricken with polio at age four, McGhee was a powerful vocalist who rose to prominence with a picking style that was distinctly different than his contemporaries. He worked alongside his hero, Blind Boy Fuller, in the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. He and Terry met in 1939 and started working together after Fuller’s death two years later. They were an essential part of the folk revival of the ‘60s and worked together until 1975 – even though they hadn’t spoken to one another in decades over a dispute, the origin of which neither could remember.

Both Poggi — pronounced with a soft “g”, who produced Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train, in Milan, Italy, where he fronts the band Chicken Mambo, is a one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the Piedmont harp style, a technique in which Davis, an award-winning singer, guitarist, actor and storyteller, is also gifted. The pair have recorded frequently together and toured both sides of the Atlantic, delighting audiences wherever they appear. And Guy also revived Sonny’s Finnian role in three different runs on the New York stage.

“Brownie and Sonny were two musicians whose work will never surpassed, let alone improved on,” says Guy. While that might be true, this writer is old enough to have experienced those giants on multiple occasions in my youth and, more recently, been blessed with the good fortune of catching Davis and Poggi in concert, too. Even though they deliver much of the same material as their predecessors, they achieve a level of intimacy that Terry and McGhee never approached – possibly because of personal differences. And that warmth flows like a torrent from the digital imprint on this CD. ~Marty Gunther

Sonny & Brownie's Last Train" is a loving tribute by The Ambassador of the blues, Guy Davis and international harmonica star, Fabrizio Poggi. Recorded in Milan Italy, Guy and Fabrizio explore the the music of one the great blues duos in history. Besides many engaging covers like "Evil Hearted Me" and "Hooray, Hooray These Women is Killing Me" Guy penned an original composition for the release.