The Black Keys have shared the music video for their rendition of R.L. Burnside’s “Helpless Boy a Long Way From Home,” off the pair’s covers LP Delta Kream.
Like the video for their interpretation of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake” and their virtual Late Show appearance in May, the Black Keys and their band — including guitarist Kenny Brown and bassist Eric Deaton, Burnside’s previous sidemen — play out the track at Jimmy Duck Holmes’ Blue Front Café in Bentonia, Mississippi. The Blue Front is the most seasoned dynamic juke joint in the U.S.
Delta Kream, delivered in May, highlights Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s fronts of nation blues tracks from Mississippi legends like Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Big Joe Williams.
“This is basically folk music on a certain level, and a lot of this music is like hand-me-downs from generation to generation,” Auerbach disclosed to Rolling Stone of the collection. “I’m singing verses that resemble third-age wrong verses. I’m singing a specific form that Junior recorded where possibly he wrecked a line, however that is the only one I know. So we were truly only sort of taking a blind leap of faith.”
In September, the Black Keys will set out on their “World Tour,” or three U.S. urban areas with worldwide names: Athens, Georgia, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Oxford, Mississippi.
