Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
What goes on tour stays on tour; unless of course it’s worth sharing with everybody you know and is so important that the words won’t keep still, they merge into something that demands to be heard properly before the tour is over. Such is the genesis of the creative beginnings of Tawny Ellis’ Ghosts of the Low Country E.P., such is the mark of respect due to the four beautiful and soulful songs, that they each in their own way offer a piece of the American psyche and introspection that used to be synonymous with the road and the effects on the productive and artistic mind.
The four songs, two original and two inspired covers, sit within time happily and with the sense of pride associated with wanting to acknowledge a special bond with the area that you most associate with, but also one that keeps you grounded enough to understand why that bond is one that must never be broken. It is a peculiar sense of fortitude and strength that Time places within certain songs; it’s one that a greater sense of responsibility to bring the very best out of them and the genesis of being born out on the open road makes it even more important to cradle that accountability, that nurturing aspect, with care.
The two original songs, the E.P.s title track and Evolve or Die are tracks that dig deep into the ways of the American psyche, of the twin dilemma that takes root of the nation’s birth and the death of its former self. Perhaps only Australia can truly understand the duality of its nation, but even then it never suffered the magnitude of internal warfare to which the United States sprang from and it is in the dynamic that Ghosts of the Low Country presents itself, the seeing through the eyes of perhaps a former self and the view that comes before them.
In covering Five Eight’s great tune Desperate Tonight and Alan Block’s and Don Hecht’s Walkin’ After Midnight, a song recorded by the great Patsy Cline, the rounded nature of the E.P. is given respect and full value esteem, an esteem that comes through being at one with Tawny Ellis’ thoughts and soul.
Four great songs captured in such a way that you cannot help but love them, they are the open road and the cloudless sky that resounds of an America at peace with itself.
Ian D. Hall