G-Love - Fixin' To Die

G-Love (Gareth Dutton) is the front man for G-Love and Special Sauce, a three piece from Philadelphia.  This latest album, Fixin' To Die, of which the title track can be heard here,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCPH3dPQkIc came about because of G-Love sharing the stage with the Avett Bothers.  They discovered they had a shared musical heritage and decided to make an album together, a selection of rearranged traditional songs, a classic cover and some G-Love originals.  So, the blurb on his MySpace page reveals, you will find on here not the hop hop blues, a genre he helped define, but a more honest collection of songs which capture the original spirit and sound he'd been looking for.  "This is the most inspired I’ve ever felt making a record - let’s just put it that way. I’m still buzzing about it.”

I discovered when I dropped this track into my iTunes library I had 2 other versions of this song,  one by Bukka White - the original, and one by Robert Plant.  All of them different and all enjoyable.  But has G-Love made a less commercial effort with this, as he claims?  I'm not sure that is strictly true.  It shouldn't detract from the fact that this is a good version, though it still sounds fairly mainstream to me.