BOO HANKS AND DON FLEMONS
Album review: "Buffalo Junction"
By Geoffrey Himes
Friday, August 17, 2012

On Feb. 20, the Carolina Chocolate Drops lost their most important mentor and inspiration when 93-year-old fiddler Joe Thompson died. But Thompson wasn’t the last link to the pre-1960, Southern Appalachian, African American music that the Chocolate Drops have done so much to popularize. One of those survivors is 83-year-old Boo Hanks, who has lived most of his life along the Virginia/North Carolina border, raising crops by daylight and playing guitar at dances by lamplight. Dom Flemons, the young co-founder of the Chocolate Drops, has now helped Hanks make the second album of his career, “Buffalo Junction,” named after his Virginia home town.

Flemons provides a lively, sympathetic background of guitar, harmonica, hambone, jug and backing vocals, but the foreground is all Hanks. At 83, he no longer has the suppleness of voice nor nimbleness of fingers that once made him a local hero, but what he still has is an irrepressible personality and knack for phrasing that cast new light on these dozen country-blues numbers. Such songs as “Railroad Bill,” “Drinking Wine, Spodie Odie” and “Move to the Outskirts of Town” may seem familiar, but Hanks adds verses from his own songs and gives the rhythm a propulsive push. This is an unadulterated dose of the distinctive Piedmont blues tradition, which inspired not only the Carolina Chocolate Drops but also so much early rock-and-roll.