Live at the Belly Up: Tab Benoit (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the movie The Wife (2017), my husband Charles and I watched a quite exciting Live at the Belly Up episode featuring singer-guitarist Tab Benoit, born in Houma, Louisiana to Cajun parenmts in 1967. He made his first album in 1993 and has been recording ever since, even though the list of his albums on Wikipedia stops in 2012 and only the text of the page mentions the album he released in 2020 (also the copyright date on this show, though I suspect that like a lot of the other “2020” episodes of Live at the Belly Up, it was filmed in 2019 pre-pandemic and just not put through post-production until 2020), The New World Blues. Benoit played the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach with just a trio – himself on vocals and electric guitar, plus a hwavy-set electric bass player and an electrifying Black drummer. On his first song, “Why Are People Like That?,” he sounded and looked like he was doing early rockabilly,bot later on he settled into a swamp groove – though he’s a mot more assertive and less laid-back than a lot of artists who get tagged with the term “swamp rock” – with songs like “We Make a Good Gumbo” which draws onb his bayou roots. (Incidentally he pronpounces the word “bayou” as “bye-you,” not the “bye-oh” pronunciation I’d long thought authentic for Louisianans.) Benoit has been winning awards since 2007, when he won his first “B. B. King Entertainer of the Year” honor at the Blues Music Awards. He won that one a second time in 2012,and also won Best Contemporary Blues Male Artist and Best Contemporary Blues Album for Medicine (2011), whose title song was his set closer at the Belly Up. Benoit won Best Contemporary Blues Male Artist for the second year in a row in 2013, and he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2010.

I’m amazed that I’ve never herd of him before, and I'm even more amazed at his virtuoso guitar playing. His Live at the Belly Up show featured only seven songs (“Why Are People Like That?,” “Whole Lotta Soul,” “Nothing Takes the Place of You,” “We Make a Good Gumbo,” “Dirty Dishes” – an interesting variation on the who’s-been-sleeping-in-my-bed sub-genre of blues songs, in this case “Who’s been eating in my kitchen?” – “Sac-a-Lait Fishing” and “Medicine”), and the main reason he played so few selections was the long, extended guitar jams he played on every one. I loved his virtuoso playing – it’s the sort of guitar I used to fantasize playing when I was in high school in the 1960’s (the age of guitar gods like Hendrix, Clapton, Zappa, Page and the recently deceased Jeff Beck) – and I also love the actual guitar he played. Wikipedia identifies it as “a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline electric guitar,” and it looks so worn, I wondered, "Did his grandfather buy it at Buddy Holly’s estate sale?” This was one of the best Live at the Belly Up shows I’ve seen in quite a while – though Samantha Fish’s and the band Joseph’s were right up there – and for sheer infectious drive it’s hard to beat Tab Benoit’s Blitzkrieg playing. Incidentally Benoit claimed in one of his interstitial intervlews that he originally worked as an airplane pilot by day and a musician by night, but “eventually my night job was paying me so much better than my day job, I decided to stick to it.”