LUTHER BEAMONT ANGRY BAD BOY

8 hours ago
14

Luther "Stormjaw" BeaumontBorn in the choking dust of a sharecropper's field outside Leland, Mississippi, in the sweltering summer of '71, Luther Beaumont grew up with the Yazoo River lapping at his heels and the ghosts of the Delta whispering through the cotton rows. His daddy was a one-eyed mule skinner who hummed old field hollers while the overseers cracked whips, but it was the Sunday sermons at the clapboard church—raw, foot-stomping gospel laced with hellfire—that first cracked Luther's soul open. By twelve, he'd scavenged a beat-up National resonator guitar from a junked '49 Plymouth, teaching himself to slide a bottleneck across the strings until his fingers bled like stigmata.They dubbed him "Stormjaw" after a '94 brawl in a Greenwood juke where he locked jaws on a switchblade-wielding hustler's wrist, spitting teeth and all into the sawdust floor—folks swore it was like watchin' a thunderstorm chew through barbed wire. Luther's sound? It's pure Son House fire, that relentless, preacher-man intensity where every note preaches damnation and redemption in the same ragged breath. You hear it in the way he drags his slide slow and deliberate on the low E, buildin' tension like House did on "Preachin' Blues," lettin' the strings moan like a sinner confessin' under a blood moon. But Luther twists it harder—infuses it with the urgency of House's "Death Letter," that frantic, foot-poundin' rhythm that turns a six-string into a tambourine and a stomp box, evokin' the old man's legendary church-to-devil crossroads pact without ever name-droppin' the crossroads myth.He ain't one for air-conditioned stages or Spotify playlists; Luther's the shadow in the corner of Red's Lounge in Clarksdale at midnight, sippin' moonshine from a mason jar, eyes half-shut like he's channelin' the Delta's original storm. His voice cracks like House's—deep, gravelly, with a falsetto wail that climbs octaves on the turnaround, hittin' notes that make the walls sweat and the crowd sway like palms in a gale. Influences bleed through: the hypnotic drone of Bukka White's one-chord vamps for those endless jams, a dash of Robert Lockwood Jr.'s crisp electric bite from his Chicago days, but it's Son House who anchors it all—the raw, unfiltered fury of a man who survived the penitentiary, the bottle, and the bottle-neck blues, only to rise preachin' through his guitar.Luther's debut tape, Yazoo Reckonin', got pressed in a hundred copies on a thrift-store duplicator during the '08 flood, traded hand-to-hand from Helena honky-tonks to Austin's Continental Club. Tracks like his cover of House's "Empire State Express" (retooled as a freight-train rant against Wall Street vampires) still circulate on dusty cassettes in pawn shops from Memphis to Macon. "Angry Boy" slots right into his wheelhouse on the raw forthcoming slab Delta Damnation—cut live off a '59 Fender amp hummin' like a hive of mad hornets, with Luther's boot thuddin' that House-style percussion, turnin' personal rage into communal exorcism. Catch him if you can; he don't tour, he migrates like the river, leavin' behind bent strings, empty glasses, and a faint scorch mark on the stage where the lightning struck. Pour him a bourbon neat, and he'll lean in close, slide ring glintin', and ask if you're ready to testify—or testify on you.

Loading 1 comment...