Fight On! True Blues Vol 2 Demands Your Attention

Corey Harris learned the title track from a recording of Jimmy Strother, a Virginia songster who played a three-string banjo in the mid-twentieth century. Harris moved the melody to a Piedmont-fingerpicked guitar, and the song arrived on the new Fight On! True Blues Vol 2 as a quiet thesis statement.

Meanwhile, nearly three decades after Guy Davis, Corey Harris, and Alvin Youngblood Hart first shared a stage at the 1996 Chicago Blues Festival, the trio has returned with a record that treats acoustic blues less as nostalgia and more as a living argument.

The Fight On True Blues Vol 2 review writes itself in the recording locations. Harris tracked his contributions at Stable Roots Productions in Virginia. Hart cut his at The Voyager’s Rest in Water Valley, Mississippi. Davis worked out of New York. Consequently, three separate rooms, three separate geographies, and a shared conviction about what this music is for — that’s the architecture of the album Yellow Dog Records released on April 17, 2026.

The Album

Nine tracks, zero filler. The record opens with Harris’s “We Are Almost Down to the Shore (Fight On),” and the Strother lineage sets the tone: this is music with receipts. Furthermore, Harris plays it with the kind of understated conviction that makes you lean in rather than lean back. The guitar does the work a banjo once did, and the migration lands like a conversation across generations.

Hart answers on “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” — the first Charley Patton song he ever learned, according to the liner material. He attacks the tune the way Patton himself did, all bottleneck grit and thumping bass string. However, none of the museum-piece preservation that sinks so many Delta tributes shows up here.

Instead, Hart sounds like a man who actually lives with this song. See our Charley Patton profile for how the original “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” still shapes the Mississippi idiom a century later.

The Piedmont-Delta Axis

“See Me When You Can” and “What’s That I Smell” continue the trade-off pattern. However, the most telling track may be Davis’s “Everything I Got Is Done In Pawn,” a reworking of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree.”

Davis transforms Cotten’s deceptively simple fingerpicked lament into a contemporary blues about economic precarity. Moreover, the tune keeps Cotten’s alternating-bass signature but adds a weight that was always lurking in the original. Readers chasing the Piedmont lineage behind Davis’s arrangement should start with our Elizabeth Cotten biography.

“Deep Sea Diver” and “Belong to the Band” push into gospel-blues territory — the latter a Rev. Gary Davis staple that Harris has clearly internalized. The Rev. Gary Davis guide traces how that repertoire moved from Harlem rent parties to folk revival stages, and Harris’s reading honors both stops on that journey.

Highway 61 and the Final Statement

Hart’s take on “Highway 61” isn’t the Dylan reading — it’s the blues reading, the road as both escape and indictment. Moreover, Hart strips the track to its bones and lets the geography do the talking. The closer, “Everything I Got Is Done In Pawn,” doesn’t resolve anything. It just sits with the listener, which is the point.

The production serves the material. Chris Whitley engineered Harris’s tracks; Justin Showah engineered Hart’s. Both rooms captured acoustic instruments with the kind of honesty that acoustic blues demands — no digital gloss, no overdub clutter, just guitar, voice, and the specific weight of the room. Therefore, the album sounds less like a studio construction and more like three fireside performances edited into a single sequence.

Artist Context

Davis, Harris, and Hart occupy a specific lane in contemporary blues. They’re not revivalists, and they’re not contemporary electric players with an acoustic side project. Instead, they’re practitioners who treat the pre-war songbook as a living language rather than a closed catalog. Their 2013 True Blues project — the one this album explicitly follows — drew widespread acclaim for exactly that posture, and Vol. 2 extends it without repeating it.

Harris brought ethnomusicology training and a career that’s tracked the blues across the Atlantic to Mali and back. Davis, son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, came through the New York folk and theater worlds before committing fully to the songster tradition.

Hart, meanwhile, anchors the Mississippi side of the triangle — a Grammy winner who has spent thirty years mapping the state’s deep blues geography from inside it. Consequently, three distinct origin stories converge on a shared understanding: the music’s survival depends on artists who can carry it, not just curate it.

The “Fight On” single arrived ahead of the album and signaled the record’s intent clearly. This is a political record without being a polemic, a traditional record without being reverent, and a collaborative record made by three men who recorded their parts in three different states.

The Verdict

Fight On True Blues Vol 2 is a front-porch record for readers who take their porch seriously. Put it on at dusk with the good whiskey, and let the tracks breathe between songs. Furthermore, listen on headphones if you want to hear how three rooms sound stitched together; listen on speakers if you want the music to fill a space. Either way, this is not background listening.

For blues fans who came to the music through Chicago electric or Texas amplified schools, this record is a reminder that acoustic blues never stopped evolving. Moreover, connect the record’s cultural arc to our deeper dive on blues music and social justice, which traces the throughline from Patton to contemporary Black blues artists defending the form.

For listeners new to acoustic blues, start with our Piedmont Blues pillar or Delta Blues overview and come back to this album with more context.

Thirteen years separate the two True Blues volumes. Vol. 1 made the case that Davis, Harris, and Hart belonged at the front of the acoustic blues conversation.

Meanwhile, Vol. 2 makes the case that the conversation itself is urgent — that the tradition requires active defenders, not just admirers. Consequently, what this album means for the genre isn’t subtle: as long as artists like these keep cutting records like this one, the pre-war songbook remains a working document rather than a museum catalog.

Put it on. Pay attention.

Jess

Blues fan since the early 70s with decades of writing, photography, and broadcasting across blues publications and internet radio. Now sharing the music's rich history and the artists who shaped it at BluesChronicles.com.

See Full Bio