By Frank Matheis
This is a repeat of an article published in Living Blues magazine Issue # 294. Vol.56. #1. Jan. 2025
When so-called pundits pontificated that the roots blues was dead, the late great Phil Wiggins always retorted with a snide grin, “Well, they ought to get out more.”
They said it before Taj Mahal, Doug Macleod, John Hammond, Cephas & Wiggins and Paul Geremia emerged. They said it decades later, before Keb Mo, Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Eric Bibb, Otis Taylor and Guy Davis hit the scene. They kept saying it until Jerron Paxton came along. Still, they kept saying it. Now we have Jontavious Willis, Rhiannon Giddens, Hubby Jenkins and many more, but those same jokers are still stuck in some imaginary place in time when it all allegedly ended.
Thankfully, the pundits were dead wrong! The music is alive and well. Whenever they declared the genre dead, the blues persisted, and the new sensations kept coming. The latest prodigy is the exciting youngster Harrell Kavon Davenport, a singer/songwriter from Richland, Mississippi – a recent high school graduate, just 17 years old at the time of this writing. The lad is raising eyebrows wherever he shows up and the big time awaits! Young Rell plays harmonica and guitar most capably, and he practices with serious discipline for eight hours a day. He has an arsenal of a Stratocaster, Guild and Taylor acoustics, and his favorite Epiphone 335 Pearl – a jazz guitar played very frequently by blues guitarists.
The new generation of 21St Century blues players are much different than those of the past. Many are committed to getting higher education. They study and prepare for the business end of things, determined not to slip into bad deals like those before them, owning their publishing and controlling their destiny. They are astute students of the history of their people, and the musical traditions that they are carrying on. The sharp-dressed Young Rell plans to be a professional musician, and he clearly has the chops to do so now, but he has the good sense and upbringing to get an education first, intent on studying African American Studies and Public Management Administration, hopefully at Ole Miss – the University of Mississippi. Like many young players today, Young Rell is social media savvy, using YouTube and Tik-Tok to gain new audiences and build a base of followers. He now has a manager and is working on his first album at JoyRide Studios in Chicago.
The young bard Davenport reports that he has at least 150 songs already written, and he owns his publishing. His playing on guitar and harmonica is already stylistically sophisticated and advanced, and wow, he’s just getting started. Humble, polite, well-raised and articulate, he is destined for artistic greatness and music business success because he is committed and smart. With that kind of diligence and good sense, he is on his way! He lists some heavy hitters as his primary influences: Dave and Louis Myers, T-Bone Walker, and Albert Collins. How many 17-year-old kids, besides musical protégées, go as deep as listing Charlie Christian, Sonny Rollins, George Vincent, Wes Montgomery, Pee Wee Crayton, Lowell Fulson and Pete Guitar Lewis as influences? Young Rell is a swift harmonica player, citing Billy Branch, Sonny Terry, Phil Wiggins and Sonny Boy I as primary influences.
“I’m a kid who plays the blues, but there’s much more to what and why I play it. I play the blues because it’s in me. It’s my culture. It runs through my veins. It comes from right here in Mississippi, right here in the Delta. It’s a culture that’s slowly fading when it comes to young African Americans playing the blues. Most people look at a 17-year-old kid, and say, oh, you haven’t been through nothing – how can you play the blues? But deep down inside there’s a lot of things that people don’t know. I have a father, but he’s not around. That’s one of the reasons. I was bullied in school because I played and I like the blues. At first, I started using it as a form of revenge. As I thought about it, I recognized that my ancestors wouldn’t like that I was using their music that way. They used it as a form of escape and of freedom and a way to let their voices be heard. It’s just in me to play it and be good to it. I’ve been beaten – all because of my love for the blues. That saddens me, because I see there are still kids that don’t accept others because of their musical preferences, or because of how they dress, what they wear, what they do. I took a record to school – Jimmy Reed’s High and Lonesome – my grandfather gave it to me. I took it for show-and-tell to the class and played it on the record player. When we came back from lunch my record was on the floor broken. The kid who did it told me after school that he did it. Then, he beat me up. It was not only the blues, but it was also how I dressed. They would sag their pants and follow all the newest fashion trends – whereas I was this country kid who wore my pants with a crease, and I cuffed my button-down shirts. I dressed, different from them. I just didn’t fit in with what they liked. Things changed as I got older. Around the 9th grade, I went to private school, and I started getting attention from girls because they like the guitar playing. But the guys – they’re like, “Oh, it’s so boring and it’s sad, old people’s music.”
He was raised by a single mom, who provided the support that allowed Young Rell to emerge as one of the most promising new gentlemen of the blues. “I was living in Leland, Mississippi. We went to the pawn shop in Greenville, and there was this no-brand acoustic box hanging up on the wall and he wanted $100 for it. I asked my mother to buy it for me. She said she didn’t have the money. The owner overheard it, and said, “Well, I can let you do payment installments.” At first, she was saying that she didn’t think she could manage it, but we went back the next week, and she gave him 50 bucks and paid it off gradually. I started practicing and never stopped. The first song I ever heard was You Don’t Have to Go by Jimmy Reed. I learned how to play that on that cheap box, but I didn’t know the difference. The action was high, and it had 12-gauge strings on it. It was more for slide, but back then I didn’t know what a slide was. I learned by ear. I would rewind the YouTube videos – and eventually I started buying 45s. I’d just try to grab that shuffle and get it as close as I could to the record. There were no local blues musicians down here, surprisingly, or at least that I heard of at that time. There was a guy who we knew named Porter Dixon who played in church, and he taught me how to play that shuffle the right was.
My mom is caretaker of the elderly. I benefitted from the kindness of people because we never had much money. Somebody gave me a Gibson, and I couldn’t get it to work right for anything, and so I traded it for a Strat. A friend gave me the Guild. Most of these guitars were gifts. I was grateful for it, but I was using a Rogue, but the classical guitar was supposed to have nylon strings on – I put steel strings on it and was using it as a little parlor guitar. The first guy who gave me a real electric guitar was Anthony Wild from Kids Rock the Nation, the foundation – I think they’re from Florida. A friend from California, one of my TikTok followers, had a Taylor guitar in his closet and I didn’t use it – it had a few cracks in the body. I cleaned it up and started playing it.”
“I try to write a song every day, and if I can’t do that, I’ll write a chorus. With me it starts from conversations and stuff that’s happened to me over the years. I have a song called Fatherless Child which is obviously about my father not being around. All the songs I write are either about my experiences or friends’ experiences or conversations. I could be on the phone with somebody, and they might say something catchy, and I’ll write it down. I also take from a lot of poems. I try not to listen to other musicians because sometimes it’s so hard to come up with your own melodies. When I arranged Fatherless Child – a minor tune – I was thinking of Albert King. When I think minor, I always think of his arrangements without the bridges. I was also thinking of Lee Oscar when it came to harmonica, and how I can make it sound like me. I don’t want to sound like Albert King. I try not to sound like others. I want you to hear me, because I’m singing the song, I’m telling you the story, and I’m delivering it to you. I want you to feel me, just like you can hear me, and I want you to know that it’s me.”
Young Rell is eagerly soaking up everything he can learn from anyone who crosses his path. His Chicago based manager, Matthew Skoller, brought him to Rosa’s Lounge where he performed with Stephen Hull on second guitar, Kenny Smith on drums, E.G. McDaniel on bass and John Kattke on keys. “We packed the place out, and there was so much love there and so many great legendary musicians. I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve done. There’s more on the roster for this year that will be even bigger. I’m going to Switzerland in November to play the Lucerne Blues Festival. I am playing with the Nola Blues Review with Benny Turner and Trudy Lynn and Lil’ Jimmy Reed. I’m also going to Denmark before then, playing the Blues Heaven Festival, and playing solo gigs. The biggest thing was when I played Rosa’s and my manager came back and said Bob Stroger said he wished Pinetop was here to see you, because Pinetop would love you – that really touched me, because nobody had ever said anything like that before.”
The future looks bright for Harrell Davenport. He is launching a GoFundMe to kickstart the new record to raise cash to move forward with the album. He is also booked in the Best Damn Blues Festival in Janesville, Wisconsin and in Austin’s famed Antone’s, opening for Major Handy. Plus, the Eastside Blues Festival and the King Biscuit Festival. He’s played Ground Zero in Clarksdale, Mississippi a few times.
Says the young maestro, “I’ll just leave you with this: whatever music you play, let the music speak through you. Let there be feeling – what you play. Ronnie Baker Brooks once told me: Play what you feel but use what you know. And what you know is what you feel.”