Artist:     Jeremiah Johnson

Album:     Heavens To Betsy

Label:     Ruf Records

Release Date:     2.28.20 83

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There’s not enough sexually suggestive content on the whole of Jeremiah Johnson’s Heavens To Betsy for an R-rating, though a parental warning could accompany the grinding “Tornado.” Rife with steamy double-entendres and slathered in Frank Bauer’s smoldering saxophone, it’s a creeping, slow-burning ode to an aggressively amorous woman and a hip-swinging bombshell of desire and temptation urged on by lusty backing vocals. Swinging sledgehammer riffs and delivering hot, stinging jabs, all covered in Lynyrd Skynyrd grit and smoke, Johnson succumbs willingly.

The rest of the guitar-slinging, blues-rock dynamo’s newest effort is more family friendly, leaning hard on the kind of anthemic, working-class Southern rock that raised him right. Soulful and sunny, the love song “Ecstasy” is a warm Muscle Shoals embrace, while the life-affirming, countrified “Leo Stone,” with its feel-good tides of acoustic strumming and simmering organ, welcomes Johnson’s new child into the world with joy and a young father’s blissful hopes and dreams. They both carry forward the poetic spirit and raw honesty of the Allman Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band, while “White Lightning” is awash in sunlight, a bucolic Dixie uprising flooded by mellow sax. It shares the trials and tribulations of a distressed Southern farmer, whereas hard-charging rockers “Castles in the Air” and “American Steel” just want to drive and get away from it all.

As solid as ever, Johnson’s engaging, down-to-earth songwriting has matured, as the moving ballad “Long Way Home” comes to grips with a grandmother’s fight with dementia. Occasional manly whoops and hollers suggest Johnson still likes to have a good time, however, and the lively jump swing of “Preacher’s Daughter” closes Heavens to Betsy with a sweaty, juke joint free-for-all. There’s plenty of space for Johnson’s neat and tidy solos to fly, and when he wrestles with the Booker T. Jones-William Bell blues classic “Born Under a Bad Sign,” made famous by Albert King, he stomps it into the ground with gusto. Meanwhile, “Soul Crush” flashes wah-wah guitars like highway construction warning lights at night, but it also crawls around in the dark, as if to sneak up on whatever it’s hunting. There’s something interesting around every corner of Heavens to Betsy.

—Peter Lindblad