Mark Harrison - The Road To Liberty (2021)

The Road To Liberty is the seventh album by the London-based old-timey acoustic bluesman Mark Harrison. Built around the core trio of Harrison on 12-string and National guitar, double bass player Charles Benfield and drummer Ben Welburn, it’s a value for money double album set of 21 self-penned tracks that sport such influences as Mississippi John Hurt, Eric Bibb, Guthrie and Blind Willie McTell. You know you’re in for a good time from the opening Tribulation Time, a nimbly picked, jaunty acoustic blues with shuffling brushed snares driving it along and lyrics that hew to old school themes of damnation and salvation (“I feel like folding, I feel like giving up/But deal me another, I might just get some luck”).

That roll of the dice, the turn of a card image carries on through the National steel coloured Everybody Knows (“You chance your arm, you ride your luck/Your luck runs out sometimes…That’s the way it goes”) while, with its circling guitar pattern and hints of early Dylan, Passing Through touches on the “come and go” nature of life populated by “cruel women and faithless men” while Club Of Last Souls captures that feeling of having things turned upside down (“I’ve joined the club of lost souls/And I’ve been cut adrift/I’m standing with my thumb out/But no one gives me a lift”). Given a Detroit backdrop, another fine folk-blues, Toolmaker’s Blues, turns its lens on economic downturns and those who bear the brunt (“How can you be a toolmaker/When nobody’s buying tools?/They closed down the factory/Put us all out of a job/No problem for the people/Who chose to kill us off”).

There’s only one instrumental in the set, but with shaker percussion and Morrison’s slide picking, reminding me of Leo Kottke, Last Bus Home is not one to be missed.

It takes us to halfway through the first disc, and rather than turn this into a marathon by commenting on every track, let me direct you to particular personal highlights, firstly with the circling notes of Wheels Going Round mirroring its theme of life’s revolving doors, the killing floor blues Skip’s Song, and the playful tick-tocking rhythm I’m Damned (“On a sea of trouble in a patched up boat/Bail like hell just to keep afloat”) that has an almost playground feel to it.

Opening the second disc with the shuffling snares urgency and sprightly dustbowl picking of All Rise (“Come on judge, no need to be mean/Times were hard and I was pretty green/I plead guilty to some minor misdemeans/I’m not the worst man that you’ve ever seen”), the jollity of the tunes continue to counterpoint the downbeat lyrics, as, for example, Hard Life (“I can’t pay the rent and I can’t pay the bills/And I can’t get off these goddam pills”) or the Dylanesque jug band scuffed Lowlife Avenue (“One foot in the gutter/Trying to keep the other one out/Easy to keep sliding/Easy to fall further down”).

Elsewhere Doing Time adopts a chain gang drumbeat for its penitentiary blues (“I can’t remember quite what I did wrong/But it must have been bad I’ve been in this place so long”) while both the slow blues Curl Your Toes (“You can start off running, come to a bitter end/Break some fences you can never mend/You can listen to cheap philosophy/And find one that’ll let you off scot-free”) and Don’t Let the Crazy Out the Bag Too Soon (“That crazy makes you say those words/You know will wreck your world/It makes you say things you don’t mean”) return to the basic idea that the world’s a place where some days you fall face down in shit and other days you just step in it. Or, to put it another way, in Restless Mind, “I’m on the road to liberty/But the road was closed, there was a riot going on”.

There are, though, brighter rays. While there may be a “Whole lot of heartbreak, so many bad deals”, Go Nice, with its reference to the Candyman (more the dope dealer who gives you a high than the urban hook-handed slasher myth), also reminds us there’s a “Whole lot of good luck when the dice are thrown” and of the “Blind man singing, message understood/You can be free”. Likewise, it ends with the clip-clopping Fox Chase’s defiance of the odds (“I took a lot of punishment, out on the street/But I’m not beat, I’m not beat/I took a lot of blows that knocked me off my feet/But I’m not beat, I’m not beat”) and the funeral blues lurch of By The Side Of The Road which takes its place in the peace at the end of life’s troubles genre as he sings “Many times I went the wrong way/Many times I trudged uphill/Many times I’ve been mistreated/And confined against my will/Doesn’t matter now, let the ill winds blow/And take some rest/By the side of the road”.

Played and sung with the easy-going manner that can only come of honing your craft over the years but never mistaking polish for passion, like all the best blues players, Harrison offers up a mirror to our troubles and challenges, and, while he might not be able to solve them, he still makes us smile as we go through them.