featuring…
♫ Alvin Youngblood Hart, Territory
🍺 Anchor Steam Beer
Words & photos: Vincent Abbate
Last time out, while revisiting 1999’s Greens From The Garden, I found myself thinking about another, similarly eclectic blues album from the same period: Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Territory. This 1998 release was the follow-up to Hart’s stunning debut Big Mama’s Door – a record that had catapulted the Oakland, California native to the forefront of an emerging wave of traditionally minded acoustic bluesmen. Just two years later, he made a clear statement informing the world he was not going to be pigeonholed.
Even today, Hart’s “music is music” philosophy is right there on his website for all to see: “I have a great disdain for genre segregation. I try to avoid that practice.”
On Territory, the big man with the powerful hands put his money where his mouth is. True, the album includes a few traditionals, performed in the spirit of Leadbelly and Bukka White, as well as an update of Skip James’s “Illinois Blues.” But on the whole, the musical ground Hart stakes with the disc’s eleven cuts goes well beyond what anyone was expecting at the time.
Across the bay from Hart’s birthplace, in the taverns of late 19th century San Francisco, steam beer emerged as a unique variation on the lager. It’s perhaps the lone beer variety indigenous to the United States. San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company owns the trademark and is thus the only brewer allowed to use the term for what’s otherwise referred to as “California common beer.” Not a very enticing name. Nevertheless, we’re going to give Anchor Steam Beer a try as we spend some time with Alvin.
Blues and brews by the bay today, you say? Hooray!
