Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band

When you hear a band testify that their latest album was “written by candlelight and then recorded using the best technology available in the 1950s,” you can be pretty sure this Big Damn Band is no ordinary assemblage of musicians. Once known exclusively for playing acoustic guitar in the tradition of Mississippi icons Charley Patton and Bukka White, Reverend Peyton’s country blues seemingly have migrated north and plugged in with Chicago giants Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. While they’re only a trio, the Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band deliver a sound that lives up to their name, with thick, bass-heavy, blues-based guitar figures and growling vocals accompanied by muscular but minimal drumming and the metallic percussive scratch of a washboard (AllMusic).

“With his wife, Breezy, serving as a one-woman amen corner, and Max laying down the floppy-boot-stomp drums behind Peyton’s spiky, waspish National steel slide guitar on tracks like ‘Something for Nothing,’ the result is a peculiarly infectious blues crusade, touching on themes of money, morality and social responsibility” (The Independent UK). Vintage yet timeless, sagacious but not preachy, powerful without overpowering, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band has just the right amount of everything you need for a romp stompin’ hootenanny of a good time. The country blues trio that won over crowds on more than one Warped Tour knows how to make an audience move. “I like songs that sound happy but are actually very sad,” Peyton says. “I don’t know why it is, but I just do.” On a track from their latest, Dance Songs for Hard Times, the Reverend sings “We may not get another chance. Oh, please don’t tell me you’re too cool to dance.”

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