Live In The Queen's Lounge With Eric Bibb
Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise
Eric Bibb lives up to the promise of the term "legendary" in the title Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise. Truly a legend in the making, Bibb is his proud daddy's son. His father, Leon Bibb, today is described as a Folk and musical theatre singer and TV personality. In his time, however, Leon was vilified by the musical press. "Serious" critics criticized Leon during "the Folk scare" for being too polished and theatrical for a genre that at the time was building on the music of the "people" with people meaning mostly rural uneducated practitioners of Appalachian, Delta, and Dust Bowl homespun songs.
"Everybody wanted the next Leadbelly," says son Eric. "What makes a sharecropper more authentic than a southern young man who aspires to be a Broadway musical theatre artist? What makes one artificial and the other one real?"
Like his father, Eric is a polished singer, but in a world that now accepts African-American singers that have a studied delivery and sing about timeless topics that have nothing to do with sharecropping. Meticulously dressed in slacks, jacket, plain T-shirt, and his patented flat-brim hat, this 51-year-old man with skin that looks like caramel-colored porcelain, who looks like a thin Harry Belafonte, sings in an operatically clean and perfect voice. At one point in his second set on the ship he stood up and humorously...
