James “Super Chikan” Johnson portrays slices of everyday Delta life on Shoot That Thang (Rooster Blues 2645; 54:41). A talented folk artist (he paints maps of the Mississippi Delta on flattened gas cans that serve as the bodies of the scrap-metal guitars he plays), Super Chikan is purely self-taught and strictly homemade. He imbues unique songs like “Bus-Train-Rain,” “Mennonite Blues,” “Junky Trunk,” “Wrong to Sing the Blues” and “Staingy Wid It” with a playful, down-home sense of humor, and he tends to go for the wah-wah pedal a lot on his solos. “Marry Me” is a lone piano boogie-woogie, while the title track is a rollicking guitar boogie out of the John Lee Hooker book, interspersed with typically unique Chikanisms.
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