It's easy enough to dismiss the blues as something tucked safely away in the past. That has been the critical attitude for the last few years, an attitude which stems from an apprehension of the blues as a vehicle for romance, a catchall symbol for the kind of pain and suffering and life experience which a young white audience in the Sixties imagined it would never gain. As that audience grew up, it understandably moved on to other things, and the result was that when the so-called blues revival ended, the blues was officially pronounced dead.

But, as Otis Spann and Albert Murray have both pointed out, the blues never die, because the blues serve a multiplicity of needs, neither all tendentious and meaningful, as some critics would have it, nor as a Seventies audience increasingly came to demand, unadulterated boogie music. Blues is, like the best country and gospel and soul, made from the heart, an elemental response to experience which may no longer be fashionable but can never really go out of style.

That is why the recent flurry of blues releases, from retrospective Junior Parker to rejuvenated Muddy Waters, is so heartening. Of the half-dozen or so albums that stand out—including fine efforts from such eminent bluesmen as Otis Rush and Jimmy Dawkins—none is as forceful or as startling a revelation as Son Seals' new record on Alligator.

At 34, Son Seals is probably the youngest bluesman currently making records. Although his first album three years ago (The Son Seals Blues Band; Alligator 4703) was notable both for his arresting original compositions ("Your Love Is like a Cancer") and slashing Albert King-styled guitar, there is nothing in that album to prepare one for the full force and mastery of his new work. Midnight Son represents a giant step by a major blues talent who, with this record, comes into a commanding new style of his own.

To begin with, the guitar playing with its thick oozing tone and obvious debt to Albert King (Seals was King's drummer for a time and has known King since Albert played regularly at Seals' father's juke joint on Osceola, Arkansas) is just about as raw and dirty as anything since Jimi Hendrix. The vocals, which on the earlier album showed a tendency to imitate the pronounced vibrato of Magic Sam, here have the strength, buoyancy and, above all, confidence of a young Muddy Waters. The compositions, while mainly uptempo (only the superb "Going Back Home" shows the more reflective side of Seals' writing), continue to exhibit the wit, insight and imagination of the first record. And even more remarkably, the production sets a new standard for so-called "collector" labels with a live, full-bodied sound, tight arrangements, enterprising horn parts and swinging contemporary rhythms that bring to mind commercial labels like Chess or Cobra in their heyday. This is fusion music in the very best sense (a riff from "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" mixes with contemporary, disco and even a stray rockabilly influence); it is the sort of "new thing" which could become genuinely popular if only it were given a hearing. There's really something happening here, and indeed for me Midnight Son is as significant a blues album release as anything that has come along in the past decade.

"People, we just can't let the blues die, blues don't mean you no harm," Otis Spann declared on record about a dozen years ago. Since that time many of the great bluesmen (including Spann himself) have died, but if we could forget about labels for a moment or two, there would really be no need to discuss the imminent demise of the music. Because the blues were never so much a form as a description of a condition, a rendering without judgment of an unchanging human response. "When you in trouble," Spann sang, "blues is a man's best friend/Blues ain't gonna ask you where you going/And the blues don't care where you been." (RS 241)

PETER GURALNICK