Black Bayou Robert Finley

• 1Livin’ Out A Suitcase03:09
• 2Sneakin’ Around03:40
• 3Miss Kitty03:58
• 4Waste Of Time03:34
• 5Can’t Blame Me For Trying03:29
• 6Gospel Blues02:49
• 7Nobody Wants To Be Lonely03:13
• 8What Goes Around (Comes Around)03:36
• 9Lucky Day03:24
• 10You Got It (And I Need It)03:19
• 11Alligator Bait06:10
• Total Runtime40:21

Info for Black Bayou

Robert Finley's Black Bayou takes listeners on a journey through the haunting, mystical landscapes of Louisiana while sharing deeply personal stories. From the slow-burning funk of "What Goes Around (Comes Around)" to the upbeat and groovy "Sneakin' Around," each track on this album showcases Finley's exceptional tone and vocal versatility. Produced by Dan Auerbach, every note on this album is a testament to Finley's musical prowess and his unwavering commitment to soul, R/B and the blues.

“I remember the first time my pawpaw took me down to the Black Bayou,” Robert Finley recalls on “Alligator Bait,” a talking blues that closes out his visceral and vibrant new record. As the guitars pop and crackle around him, coalescing into a slow rhythmic crawl like an airboat along muddy waters, the 70-year-old Louisiana native casts back in his memory for this harrowing story. Dressed in swamp boots and waders, the kid “stepped on a log and the log moved!” His grandfather shot the gator that snapped at him, but the boy quickly realized that he was intended as bait. There’s some humor to the outrageous incident, but the song emphasizes the tragedy of it: how he was never able to forgive his grandfather for risking his young life, how the incident drove a wedge through several generations of Finleys.

“A song should tell a good story,” says Robert Finley sixty years later. “By the time you hear it beginning to end, it should be like reading a short story or a novel. It should be more than just a laugh. It should leave some kind of impression on whoever’s listening to it. And it should stay as close to the truth as possible.” He’s a masterful storyteller, and “Alligator Bait,” like the rest of Black Bayou, has the richness of detail, the depth of character, the tragedy of betrayal, the promise of forgiveness—in short, the immense complexity of emotion and humanity—that defines great southern literature.

Finley recorded that song and the rest of the album up at producer Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. It’s the fourth time the duo have worked together, although for this record they did things a little differently. Rather than write songs beforehand, they devised everything in the studio, with Auerbach leading a band of some of the finest players around: drummers Patrick Carney and Jeffrey Clemens, bassist Eric Deaton, guitarist Kenny Brown, and vocalists Christy Johnson and LaQuindrelyn McMahon—who just happen to be Finley’s daughter and granddaughter. They worked quickly, devising their parts spontaneously and usually getting everything in one take. “I started singing, and they started playing,” Finley explains. “That’s how we made the album. It wasn’t written out. Nobody used a pencil and paper. We just sang and played together in the studio.”

Together, they created a vivid collection of songs that depict life in North Louisiana, with Finley playing the role of charismatic and knowledgeable tour guide through these swamps and forests. He was born in Winnsboro, but has spent most of his life in Bernice, a small town of about 1,600 souls just thirty miles from the Arkansas border. For years he worked as a carpenter while playing blues in juke joints and singing gospel in churches around the region. Mixing in southern soul, heavy rock, swamp pop, jazz, folk, and anything else that crosses his mind, Finley developed and refined an exuberant and omnivorous playing style. At age 60, however, he lost his sight due to a medical condition—a tragedy that ended his woodworking business but gave him more time to devote to music.

Over the last seven years, he has released three critically acclaimed albums—including 2021’s autobiographical Sharecropper’s Son—and even appeared on the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (eventually making it to the semi-finals). In addition to touring as a headlining act, he has shared bills with The Black Keys and the Easy Eye Sound Revue and even opened for Greta Van Fleet, which established him as an energetic and uniquely charismatic performer bringing his larger-than-life personality to the stage. All of those experiences come to bear on Black Bayou, especially on songs like the lusty “Sneakin’ Around” and the devastating “Gospel Blues.” “I decided to put as much of the Louisiana lifestyle as I could on this album,” he says. “I was raised here, and I wanted to do something good for this place. I wanted to show what life’s like around here. A lot of people in the city, they’ve never been to a swamp or seen a live gator. They’ve never eaten gator meat. They don’t know anything about this place, so I want to show them.”

“It’s amazing to realize how much of an impact Louisiana has had on the world’s music,” says Auerbach, “and Robert embodies all of that. He can play a blues song. He can play early rock and roll. He can play gospel. He can do anything, and a lot of that has to do with where he’s from.”

North Louisiana is a place where struggle and celebration commingle in everyday life, where death looms, through the jaws of an alligator or just the gradual pace of time. Finley opens “Nobody Wants To Be Lonely” with a line about visiting a friend at a nursing home—not the typical subject matter for a blues song, yet not dissimilar from the isolation and despair often associated with the genre. “So many people have been forgotten,” Finley explains. “Their kids drop them off and go with their lives. I go down occasionally and perform at the old folks home in Bernice. Just take my guitar and play for thirty minutes or so, try to get them to dance, try to bring some joy to them.”

Black Bayou captures these small moments of life, the tragedies and betrayals, the triumph of making it another day. Despite the success of his previous albums and the demands of touring the wide world beyond Bernice, Finley isn’t keen to call any other place home. “Livin’ in the city’s just a waste of time,” he laughs on “Waste Of Time,” with its heavy riffs and gravel-road groove. “I’m not interested in living in no big city,” he says. “There’s good places here for hunting and fishing. I can fall asleep in my yard or sleep out on my porch, and nobody’s gonna bother me. Nothing bad is gonna come and get me.”

Finley still plays small clubs around the region—even the occasional nursing home—with a small crew of local musicians that includes his daughter and grandchildren. Rather than move to where the music industry is, Finley is bringing the industry down to Bernice and working to boost regional acts. Whether he’s building a new studio on his property or sharing stages with up-and-comers, his goal is to do for them what others have done for him: get their music out to the wider world, find bigger audiences, amplify their voices. “We got a lot of good talent down here in North Louisiana, but nobody’s really done much with it. A lot of people just haven’t had the opportunity to record—or even just be heard. It worked for me, so I might as well try to help someone else get discovered, too.”

If previous albums established him as a formidable blues and soul artist, Black Bayou reveals Finley as something even more distinctive: a truly original Louisiana storyteller who evokes the place and its unique culture for the rest of the world. “A lot of people think the blues is supposed to be downbeat and sad, but that’s not all it is. It all depends on the artist and the stories they’re trying to tell. To me, it’s an expression of what people are going through in life, whether they’re here in Bernice or wherever. It’s reality. And reality can be sad, but there are also a lot of happy times, too.”

Or, as he sings on the album’s opener, “Livin’ Out A Suitcase”: “Been around the world, seen some of everything, but what I like about it the most is the joy that I bring.”

Robert Finley

Robert Finley
who has lost most of his eyesight and was recently forced to retire from carpentering, is a self-taught musician who started writing his own songs at age 10. Learning to play by ear, he developed a unique personal style that continues to serve him well today. “When you train yourself by ear you don’t always get the chords as perfect as they should be—and sometimes you stumble upon a better chord,” he says. “It really is a never-ending process; I’m constantly learning, and there’s always room for improvement. I’ve been playing for about 52 years; if you’re satisfied with everything you do, that don’t leave no room to grow. But the main thing, I got a great team putting this stuff together. God blessed me with the voice, but the connections are getting me in the right place at the right time in front of the right people, so I can display what I got.”

It’s that kind of team-player attitude that has helped rejuvenate his career. A few years back, Finley was playing some R & B songs to a street crowd in Arkansas when he met a member of the Music Maker Foundation, an organization that provides direct support to older and underprivileged musicians. One thing led to another, and before you know it, Finley had written, recorded, and released an LP, Age Don’t Mean a Thing, on Big Legal Mess Records in the fall of 2016.

“The way it happened so fast kinda surprised all of us,” he says. “We wasn’t looking for it to move forward at that late time in my life. It’s a win-win situation, because if I hadn’t started losing my sight I probably would have still been carpentering.”

Yet another win-win would present itself when Auerbach, The Black Keys frontman and new Nashville-based record label owner, was sent a video of the musician playing songs on the street. Recognizing the singer’s immense and innate talent, he invited Finley to sing with him on the score for a friend’s graphic novel—a dark, bluesy project released in May called Murder Ballads. But it wasn’t until the pair got into the studio together that Auerbach fully understood the exceptional power of Finley’s voice—and where that might take them.

“I realized very quickly Robert’s capable of doing so much more than old blues songs,” Auerbach says. “He could do a wide range of things very easily. He’s a blues guitar player, but when he puts his guitar down, you could set him in front of an orchestra and he would sing just as good as Ray Charles on the first take. He has that magnetic hugeness about his voice and just knows where to put it in the pocket, always.”

And so, Auerbach gathered to his studio in Tennessee a Murderer’s Row of all-time-great session musicians to record an album of songs he had written with the likes of John Prine, Nick Lowe, Pat McLaughlin, and others, with Finley as their vocal anchor. From drummer Gene Chrisman (Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield) to keys player Bobby Woods (JJ Cale, Bobby Womack) to horns by Preservation Hall and guitar by the legendary Duane Eddy himself, the assemblage was nothing short of towering—and, for Auerbach, the focus on Finley provided the icing on the cake.

“For me, each person playing on the record is who I consider personally to be at the peak of their job,” Auerbach says. “Robert is one of the greatest singers I’ve ever heard in my life, Gene Chrisman played on “Natural Woman” and “Son of a Preacher Man”…all these voices coming together, all these different writers who contributed, too. This record is made with respect to the end product like they used to do on all the old soul records. I just happened to have a bunch of songs and I knew some of them Robert would kill—I could hear his voice, and pretty much it always turned out to be right.”

The significance of the occasion and the players was not lost on Finley for a second. “These guys are legends in their own time—I’m the new kid on the block, even though I’m 63 years old, I’m the youngest one in the band,” Finley says. “I just sat back and watched ’em, ain’t much I could tell ’em. I tried to be neutral, to make suggestions but not make any complaints. I’m just grateful to be part of the team and working with such extraordinary guys. We hooked up the soul and rock and roll and made one hell of a record with something to please everybody.”

And now we have Goin’ Platinum!, the newest effort from the soon-to-be legendary soul singer Robert Finley and his crack band of geniuses. From the lovelorn bombast of “If You Forget My Love” to the soul-stirring “Medicine Woman,” and the home-on-the-road ripper “Empty Arms” to the yearning “Honey Let Me Stay the Night,” all capped by the epic closer “Holy Wine,” featuring Finley’s ethereal falsetto, Finley’s performance left Auerbach speechless—as it will anyone who lays ears to it.

“I didn’t ever have to play him any references, I just let him sing,” Auerbach says. “He naturally did what the song wanted to hear. He was capable of doing it in this huge bark, this soft whisper, a falsetto…I said, ‘Can you sing falsetto?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why don’t you give it a shot and see what happens.’ And he sang ‘Holy Wine,” just like you hear it on the record. We were all sitting in the control room and my brain short-circuited.”

As for the album title, Auerbach gives all credit to Finley and his huge but wholly considerate personality. “He was just beaming from the second he walked in the door,” Auerbach says. “Every time he’d listen to playback, he’d say, ‘It’s goin’ platinum.’ That was his catch phrase. He’s larger than life. When he walked into the session he had on a three-quarter-length leather duster, leather pants, a giant belt buckle, red sparkle shirt tucked in, cowboy hat, snakeskin cowboy boots… Like he instinctually knows what to do when he’s singing, he knew this was his time to shine. Robert just showed up to work and was smiling all day long. All of us were.”

For Finley, all praise is due to the practice itself, and to the instincts, ear, and company of which he is proud to be part. And from this point on, his focus now shifts to his performance and his bringing it to the people, which he is finally—magically—able to do again on a global scale.

“Now I’m concerned about delivering the message to the audience,” he says. “We did a great job on the recording but it’s not over yet, it’s gotta be done before the live audience, that’s when my real task comes in. What comes from the heart goes to the heart; constantly pouring your soul into it so that when you deliver it, people can feel what you feeling. To me that’s the ultimate challenge, to get them to feel what you feel. And if they do, you will know it by the end of the song.”

This album contains no booklet.