Last Of The Blues

You are locked into The Zoo, the freeform album-rock signal that still believes a guitar can carry a whole story, and the cut on the deck is “Last Of The Blues” by The Rocky Athas Group. This is Dallas muscle in a church coat. Four minutes of slow-burn Texas blues-rock, co-written by Rocky Athas, Larry Samford, Guthrie Kennard and Gregg Diamond, and sung by Samford with the kind of worn-in tenor that does not need to shout to make the room lean in. If you came looking for a title album by that name, the paper trail says otherwise: the song first landed in 2005 as track three on Voodoo Moon, the Armadillo Music set catalogued ARMD 00022, and it later turned up again on The Essential Rocky Athas, Vol. I. Reviewers who dug into that 2005 record singled this one out as the jewel of the bunch, a quiet, compelling blues carried by warm organ and short, perfectly placed guitar answers. On a station built for deep cuts, that is the whole point. The hit is the feeling, not the chart.

The lyric is a breakup letter that refuses to stay bitter. The singer takes the wreckage upstairs, asks what he is supposed to do without the love he had, and gets the oldest counsel in the book: stand up tall, that is all you can do, and help is coming through the last of the blues. He does not buy it on the first pass. He admits he feels like he is going to die, that the loss is more than he can stand, that he is walking dark avenues and may never shake the ache. Time crawls. He was not quite in hell, but he could see it from where he stood. Then the turn arrives the way real recoveries arrive, without a parade. He wakes up one day not thinking of her. A door closes, another opens, new love walks in, and the last line is not a boast. It is a report. He has seen the last of the blues. That arc, prayer to doubt to renewal, is why the song sits so comfortably between a roadhouse and a sanctuary. Athas does not solo over the confession. He punctuates it. Little crying phrases, a bent note that answers a line instead of burying it, the tone of a man who grew up on Freddie King and Leslie West and learned when to leave air in the measure.

The session itself has a working-band fingerprint. Voodoo Moon was cut at Right Ear Audio, mixed at Palmyra Studios and mastered at Screendipity, with voices and background parts from Kennard, Morris Price, Athas and Tracy Burns. Kennard, a Texas writer and player in his own right, shares the bass chair; Athas picks up the low end on a couple of other tracks. Around “Last Of The Blues” sit Road Fever, a Muddy Waters-rooted “Muddy Water Blues,” the title cut Voodoo Moon, a Dave Bartholomew cover of “I’m In Love Again,” and the closer “Stop, Drop And Roll.” Producer Jim Gaines, the multi-Grammy hand behind Santana, Steve Miller, Journey and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Blues Producer of the Year in 2003, was already in Athas’s corner from the Miracle album two years earlier. Gaines knew how to let a Texas guitarist sound huge without sanding off the club-room grain. Voodoo Moon is the middle chapter of that run, between Miracle in 2003 and Lightning Strikes Twice in 2007, the last studio album before the phone rang from England.

Rocky Athas was born October 15, 1954, in Texas, and he came up in Oak Cliff, on the south side of Dallas, in the same schoolyard orbit as Stevie Ray Vaughan. The story he tells is pure Dallas: fifth grade, talent show, “House Of The Rising Sun,” and afterward a kid walks up and says he plays guitar too. That kid was Stevie. By the time Buddy Magazine published its first Texas Tornado list in 1978, Athas was 23 and already on it, one of the youngest names in a company that would be spoken of alongside Eric Johnson, Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Billy Gibbons and Johnny Winter. Critics and club regulars hung nicknames on him the way Texas hangs nicknames on weather: the Texas Tornado, the Malice from Dallas, the young Eric Clapton. The band that carried him was Lightning, one of the biggest draws on the Texas nightclub circuit, opening for national acts and holding rooms on its own. No audition drama, no coastal makeover. Just a Strat, a Les Paul, and a reputation that traveled faster than the van.

The road out of Lightning ran through southern rock. He opened for Black Oak Arkansas in Paris, Texas, and Jim Dandy called and hired him. Athas wrote “Ready As Hell” and “Wild Bunch,” both of which landed on a Black Oak greatest-hits set, and on that circuit he crossed paths with the Bolin brothers, drummer Johnnie and Tommy of Deep Purple and the James Gang. Later came Bluesberries with Buddy Miles and Stevie Ray’s rhythm section, Double Trouble, plus a pass at “The Wind Cries Mary” for a Hendrix tribute. Glenn Hughes, Joe Walsh, sessions at Willie Nelson’s studio: the résumé reads like a backstage pass that never got laminated. In 2009 John Mayall, the godfather of British blues, asked him to take the lead-guitar chair on Tough. Guitar Player called him a veteran Texas gunslinger with a wicked tone and a thriving solo career of his own. He stayed about eight years, four albums, the last great Bluesbreaker guitarist in a line that runs through Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor. Then he came home, cut Shakin’ The Dust with Gaines again in 2017, and in 2024 put out Livin’ My Best Life, still an Epiphone artist, still fronting a band that includes his son, Rocky Athas II, on bass.

“Last Of The Blues” is the solo-years document that explains why Mayall called. It is not a shredding resume. It is phrasing, dynamics, and a lyric that trusts the listener. Samford carries the vocal like a man who has stood in that hallway. Athas answers like a guitarist who has stood there too, then found the next door. That is the Dallas school: SRV fire when the song wants fire, and restraint when the song is a confession. The Zoo keeps a seat for both. If this cut hit you where you live, the rest of the Athas trail is waiting, from the Lightning years through Black Oak, the Gaines records, the Bluesbreakers chapter and the records he is still making. Dig in at the official home, rockyathas.com, and on the channels he actually runs: Facebook, Instagram and X. And when you want the deep cuts without the commercials, you already know the address. This is The Zoo, still spinning the album side, still betting on a Texas guitar and a true story. Rock and roll lives here. Turn it up.