Best Local Solo Artist

Patrick Murphy

Sitting in the far corner of the bar, away from the stage, with the neon in the window painting him a soft red, Patrick Murphy looks more like a customer than a performer. His hat turned upside down on the table in front of him to catch possible donations, he takes a drag on his Lucky Strike, wedges into the headstock of his '33 Nashville Duolian, nods to a stool near him, and says "Hey, man, I got one for ya. It's an oldie but a goodie."

With that, Worcester's purest practitioner of the blues launches into a number from Blind Boy Fuller's catalogue. Face scrunched, brows raised, Murphy delivers a sound that rattles up from deep in his chest, detours through his nose, and escapes out the side of his mouth. He fills the room with his quirky voice as he adeptly picks and plucks at the strings of his guitar, almost as if it's an afterthought. It's non-electric, but it is still electrifying as he produces, one after the other, the truest, most genuine form of rural blues music.

Murphy's playing will take you back to an earlier time of street corners, fish fries, and Saturday-night dances when names like Bukka White, Tampa Red, and Big Bill Broonzy cut their coarse, rough-edged path from the country back roads of the South up to what would eventually become the urban Chicago style. Sometimes featuring intricate fingerpicking, other times ragged, swampy slide, Murphy's versatile guitar work is used as a backdrop for his powerful singing and unique vocal phrasing. Neither an innovator nor an imitator, Murphy simply plays songs and applies his own stamp, which is really the mark of any great bluesman. It isn't mystical, it's music by everyday people for everyday people, and Patrick Murphy is the real item.

-- John O'Neill