Like the mad love child of Robert Johnson and Jack Kerouac, Brother Dege Legg comes roaring out of the middle of Nowhere with the Delta Blues masterpiece, 'Folk Songs of the American Longhair' (CD).

After a decade spent fronting southern psych band Santeria and exploring madhouses, crap jobs, jails, drugs, trailerparks, philosophy, and every other kind of weirdness contained within the Deep South, the born & raised Cajun set out to record this tour de force acoustic, slide album. Raw, dirty, desperate, and doomed like the great Delta masters of yore the album is haunted with the ambience of the swamps. Like Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack crossed with some apocalyptic Nostradamus prophesy, the album – recorded in a shed and played on a cheap Dobro – blasts through death-obsessed, guilt-ridden, god-fearing, devil-taunting territory with a specific emphasis on the darker side of American roots music. Great blues music like this has not been heard in nearly 100 years.

Legg composed ten original tunes in the slide-Delta tradition, painstakingly paying tribute to the old masters while tossing all purist and karaoke-like tendencies to the wind. Think Son House at a séance in southern Louisiana. The songs that compose 'Folk Songs of the American Longhair' are already on their way to becoming 21st century Delta standards. Don’t believe me? Slide players from the U.S. to Europe are already covering the tunes AND THE RECORD ISN’T EVEN OUT yet. Check it out – via a series of guerilla Brother Dege youtube videos which have garnered over 250,000 plays with no promotional hype or jive. It’s there for you to witness in all of its no BS Cinéma vérité glory.

Like the field recordings of Alan Lomax, the record tunnels into the ancient mysteries of pre-war blues and its devil-obsessed masters. There’s minimal instrumentation on this thing. In a return to the unrefined basics, almost all of the tracks feature only one vocal, one resonator guitar, and one foot keeping the pulse. That’s it. Listeners are in for a treat when they hear how the music sounds, writhing about in the massive echo chamber of reality when stripped of all the studio trickery of the past three decades. It’s a return to the basics. No hype. Real music. Real people. The album hits the streets on Mardi Gras Day, February 16th.