Review – Blues Van

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Review of Bang at the Door from Blues Van in Hungary. "The Bang At The Door is one of the best acoustic blues albums I've heard in recent months." Attila Horváth

Donna Herula started learning guitar at the age of ten. When she was in high school, she played in a rock band and took jazz guitar lessons. She turned to traditional, acoustic blues as a result of one of Eric Sardinas' concerts. In her own admission, hier inspirations include Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter and Rory Block. Acoustic Guitar Magazine mentions her name among the best emerging resonator guitarists in 2016, and she was inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall Of Fame later that year. She performs regularly around the world and teaches fingerstyle and slide guitar at the Old Town School Of Folk Music in Chicago. The third solo album of her career is Bang At The Door was given the title.

The making of the album was not without difficulties: the recordings started back in 2019, but the studio work slipped due to Herula’s mother’s cancer and death, and then the loss of her mother-in-law. The disc, which contains fourteen songs, was finally released in May this year. Four songs, album launcher Bang At The Door, Can’t Wait To See My Baby, Promise Me and Something’s Wrong With My Baby, were written from a female perspective. These are compositions by Donna Herula, as are most of the songs on the album. Performing the piano, trumpet and backing vocals, Pass The Biscuits was written in memory of Herula’s late mentor, Sonny Payne, the iconic presenter of the King Biscuit Time radio show. Interwoven with humor Movin ’Back Home is about the frustration of having to move back to the parent’s house with an adult head. Jon Shain and FJ Ventre, the winners of the 2019 International Blues Challenge solo/duo category, also starred in the song.

The album concludes with a reworking of the standard Soul Of A Man by pioneering slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson . The demanding digipack-packed publication provides enough information about the origin of the disc, and we can also read the lyrics.

Bang At The Door is one of the best acoustic blues albums I've heard in recent months.

http://www.bluesvan.huAttila Horváth, Blues Van