Lay Your Burden Down

Personnel: Buckwheat Zydeco (vocals, accordion, Hammond b-3 organ, synthesizer); Stanley Dural (vocals, accordion, organ, synthesizer, background vocals); Michael Melchione, Olivier Scoazec, Michael Melchione, Sonny Landreth, Warren Haynes (guitar); Steve Berlin (baritone saxophone); Rev. Curtis Watson (trumpet); Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews (trombone); JJ Grey (Wurlitzer organ, background vocals); Lee Allen Zeno (bass guitar, background vocals); Kevin Menard, Kevin Menard (drums); Sir Reginald Dural (rub-board, washboard, background vocals).
Audio Mixer: David Farrell .
Liner Note Author: Ben Sandmel.
Recording information: Dockside Studios, Maurice, LA.
Photographer: Rick Olivier.
LAY YOUR BURDEN DOWN finds Buckwheat Zydeco (aka Stanley Dural) celebrating his 30th anniversary of recording as a solo artist. Appropriately, it's filled with the kind of genre-blurring tactics that have been part of the BZ game plan from the beginning. "Let Your Yeah Be Yeah" and "Back In Your Arms" bear bobbing reggae grooves, for instance, while "Too Much Time" and "Time Goes By" display a debt to '60s Southern soul, and blazing blues-rock is the order of the day on a version of the Memphis-Minnie-via-Led Zeppelin barn-burner, "When the Levee Breaks." It's all shot through with plenty of Buckwheat's patented zydeco accordion magic, of course, and the straight-up zydeco tunes in between are the ones where he really struts his stuff and shows he hasn't forgotten his roots.