The further down and dirty Ray Wylie Hubbard takes his music, the higher he raises the artistic ante. Dismissed more than a quarter-century ago as a cosmic-cowboy curiosity, an alcoholic casualty of a bygone era, Hubbard has somehow been reaching new creative peaks with almost each new release of original material. If Bob Dylan ever recorded a blues album, it might sound like this, but it wouldn’t necessarily sound any more inspired than Snake Farm.
Serving as Hubbard’s crucial accomplices are producer/guitarist Gurf Morlix and the rhythm muscle of bassist George Reiff and drummer Rick Richards, who supply the sort of sinew that recalls the classics of Slim Harpo or Jimmy Reed. Just as the band pares the arrangements to the bone, the songs barely waste a word, evoking the themes of sin and redemption in their primal essence.
In the opening title track, the swampiest love song you’ll ever hear, Hubbard makes a wordless shudder as eloquent as his plainspoken poetry, leaving the listener to wonder whether music this wondrously strange represents divine inspiration or the devil’s work. Whether he’s invoking “faith and grace” in “Kilowatt” or “Heartaches And Grease” in the subsequent cut, his vocal slurring makes the distinction between grace and grease all but disappear.
From the chain-gang spirituality of “The Way Of The Fallen” to the backwoods sensuality of “Polecat”, Hubbard has the life force channeled. My favorite lines, in an album full of them, come from “Rabbit”: “There’s two kinds of people in the world, the day people and the night people, and it’s the night people’s job to get the day peoples’ money.” But just reading those words can’t convey the incantation of Hubbard’s singing.