George “Mojo” Buford – Mojo Workin’

This album answers the eternal musical question: what happens when you cross a Chicago bluesman and “Surfin’ Bird”?

Very shortly after picking up Mojo Buford’s Chicago Blues Summit, this album popped up when I was doing a search on the Sundazed site, looking to fill a bag in one of their online bag sales. The story of the record alone would probably have been enough to convince me to check it out. Unlike the Blues Summit, recorded in Chicago around 1979 with a slew of Muddy Waters sidemen, this had been recorded a decade earlier, in Minneapolis, with rockers including the lead guitarist for The Trashmen (yes, the “Surfin’ Bird” Trashmen).

According to the liner notes, Buford had moved to Minneapolis and developed a local fan base, picking up his “Mojo” nickname there from the requests for Muddy’s “Got My Mojo Working.” Lonnie Knight of the band Jokers Wild and Tony Andreason of The Trashmen, got Buford into the former Kay Bank Studio. As the piano player Bruce Pedalty said, “the idea was to take this authentic blues guy and give him more of the hard, British blues-rock flavor of the day.”

Mission accomplished. This reissue sounds absolutely timeless, and could absolutely have been a hit (huge props to bassist Larry Hoffman, whose runs are amazing and really hold the whole album together). But, again according to the liner notes, the label Metrobeat (started by Andreason and partners from the Trashmen days) was looking for better national distribution for it, got distracted by another hit, and this record got shelved. It was only when Sundazed was looking through the vaults to put together a Trashmen compilation that this was rediscovered, leading to a 2020 release on the Americana Anthropology label.

For what it is – a group of musicians working mostly outside their normal genre in support of an established talent – this is truly excellent. Yeah, there are moments where it’s clear that a more accomplished blues band would be doing something more interesting – and maybe it’s as a late-learning musician who cannot truly master the form that I really relate to these guys. Sometimes you just gotta find the groove and hang on, leave the decorating to someone else. Here and there the beat slides, unintentionally. It’s all fine, because really, they’re doing great. The recording quality is so far beyond what Mojo got a decade later, and Mojo is absolutely cooking throughout. Excellent record.

Got this in January, 2025.