Tinsley Ellis cuts right to the bone on Labor Of Love, 13 original compositions spinning modern tales of floods, conflagrations, voodoo spirits, personal hardship, and heaven-sent prayers.
After forty years on the road and a lifetime spent absorbing the lessons of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Howlin’ Wolf, Tinsley Ellis returns with Labor Of Love, his most unfiltered acoustic record yet and the first fully original set of its kind in his catalog. The album follows his Blues Music Award-nominated Naked Truth and pushes even deeper into the raw, elemental corners of his craft.
Recorded with nothing but six and twelve-string Martins, a 1937 National Steel, and a mandolin he finally decided to put to work, Labor Of Love is a stripped-to-the-bone collection of 13 new songs that shift between beauty and bruise. Ellis leans hard into the Hill Country grit that shaped him, opening with the feral “Hoodoo Woman,” a stomper steeped in the spirit of R. L. Burnside. From there he jumps the rails into a John Lee Hooker churn on “Long Time,” slides into the Skip James shadows for “To A Hammer,” and channels Son House on the hard-driving “Sunnyland.” These are modern blues stories about floods, fire, voodoo, heartbreak, and the prayers that get whispered when no one is looking, delivered with the weight and weary humor earned from tens of thousands of highway miles.
That wisdom sharpened even further during a mid-album pause in Bentonia, Mississippi, birthplace of Skip James and home to Jimmy “Duck” Holmes. Ellis soaked up the atmosphere of the Blue Front Café and carried its ghostly tuning and feel straight back into the studio, adding another layer of backroads Americana to an already deep set.
Early reviews are coming in strong. Living Blues hears “a joyous and triumphant celebration of acoustic music.” AllMusic has called it “glorious, raw and propulsive.” And Blues Music Magazine praised the “glistening melodies fingerpicked with delicacy,” while Premier Guitar takes it even further by declaring Tinsley Ellis “an American music treasure.”
Ellis shrugs at the accolades, the way lifers tend to. “For me, just playing this music is a labor of love,” he says. That is the spine of the record. Not nostalgia. Not polish. Devotion. After four decades of grinding it out across clubs, cafés, juke joints, and theaters, Tinsley Ellis is not reinventing himself. He is burning down to the essence. Labor Of Love might be the purest signal he has ever sent.