Blues & Bourbon: Red’s Blues Record Release Party for ” Old Diamonds and Uncut Gems” @ Harlow’s !

Sacramento’s Red’s Blues recorded a live CD at the Starlet Room last fall, and now we will be celebrating the release of that CD, Old Diamonds & Uncut Gems! 

This night, Beth Reid-Grigsby, lead/harmony vocals, RW Grigsby, bass, Doug Crumpacker, guitar/harmonica, Tim Wilbur, drums, and very special guests Robert Sidwell, guitar, Sid Morris, piano bring the goods live again!

This is the band’s ( ALL members of Sacramento’s Blues Hall Of Fame)  fourth album!

As the title aptly notes, there are old diamonds and uncut gems. Beth and RW are wise songwriters who know how to both uplift and face hard truths Their new originals –“Singing A Brand New Song,” “Looking For a Hustle,” “Black-Eyed Sally’s,”  and Beth’s own ‘Lizzie’s Blues’ are testimony to this. Live versions of favorites like “Poor Girl,” “Sherry Ann,” Forty Years of Trouble” and “Broke Down in the Fast Lane” will thrill fans.  Special guest Jon Lawton brought it with his slide on Mike Morgan classic Texas tune,” Ain’t Worried No More.”  Great piano man Sid Morris’s version of his Floyd Dixon’s 1953 “San Francisco Blues” is a slow blues beauty.

Red’s Blues has always had a finger-poppin’ attitude—straight outta the golden years when blues, R&B and swing all meshed together and dance floors every night were filled with snake hips and slow drags. Beth Reid-Grigsby, with her sensual, southern voice and classy behind-the-beat phrasing is more a Peggy Lee or Bobbie Gentry-styled singer: smoky with languid, sexy sophistication.

Thanks to her older brother, she grew up listening to Huddie Ledbetter, Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt records and as a kid, learned from and sang songs at home with her Mom — “Summertime,” ‘God Bless the Child,’ and St. Louis Blues.” Across the street in her hometown of south Santa Barbara though, the shy seven-year-old redhead was bold enough to go perch on the neighbor’s porch listening to a Cuban salsa band rehearse, and from that learned to love the rhythms, the bass and percussion in particular. She and RW Grigsby met through the local Santa Barbara blues scene years later in 1977 and have lived in his home state of Georgia and then Texas before heading back to sunny Sacramento, California in 2006.

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2014 Grammy-nominated and Blues Music Award (BMA) winner bassist/singer/songwriter RW Grigsby has been playing since he was 14 years old and began his professional career when still a teenager. He’s toured the U.S., Canada and Europe since the ’80s. He played and recorded with Texas blues stars Gary Primich and Black Top Records’ Mike Morgan and the Crawl in the 1990s, and later with Mark Hummel and The Golden State-Lone Star Revue with legends Little Charlie Baty and Anson Funderburgh.. RW is the bassist on the 2014 Grammy-nominated and BMA-winning CD, Remembering Little Walter. He was nominated for a BMA “Best Bassist” Award in 2017 and was inducted into the Sacramento Blues Society Hall of Fame in 2018. His lauded debut Americana solo record, Grigsby’s Truck Stop, released in November of last year.

Red’s Blues guitarist Doug Crumpacker, a well-known name in Sacramento for close to forty years, is one of just a handful of  area musicians who truly taught the city about blues beginning in 1990 with his hugely popular band, The Hucklebucks (with RW on bass, Tim Wilbur on drums). A Sacramento 2016 Blues Society Hall of Fame inductee, he joined Red’s Blues in 2018. Tim has been with Red’s Blues for over eight years now, and Doug joining six years ago, was a natural fit for our band. We are all like family.

Red’s Blues draw their audiences into a grown-up music world—southern music with downhome simmer, dance floor fun and stellar, sophisticated players who know they have no need to blast at ear splitting volumes to make the biggest impact.