Homemade is an album by the American musical duo Cephas & Wiggins, released in 1999.[1][2] It was their second album for Alligator Records.[3] The duo supported the album with a North American tour.[4]Homemade was nominated for a W. C. Handy Award for best "Traditional Blues Album".[5]
The album was produced by Joe Wilson, who also cowrote a couple of the songs.[6] Cephas helped write eight of the songs; Wiggins worked on one.[7] Wiggins considered the selections to be enlivening rather than sad or depressing.[8] The album opens and closes with covers of Blind Boy Fuller tunes.[9] "Slow Blues" is a version of the instrumental Reverend Gary Davis song.[10] Two originals, "Jelly Roll" and "Meeting the Mule", explore the differences between life, and women, in the metropolitan North and country South.[6] "I Was Determined" is an autobiographical song about wanting to play the blues after hearing neighbors singing blues standards.[11]
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that "Cephas plays in ragtime-like guitar rhythms, with Wiggins's airy harp a perfect complement... Cephas's vocals are fittingly light, even though the blues are still the blues."[14]The Sunday Age said that Cephas "succeeds where few have dared, mimicking Skip James's keening vocals and unusual tuning on 'Illinois'."[10] The Toronto Star deemed the album "accessible rural dance music with low-key engaging grooves."[16]The Washington Post determined that Wiggins and Cephas weave "voice and guitar together so seamlessly that one mind seems to govern both mouths and all four arms."[6]The Star Democrat considered the album forgettable and an example of "generic" blues.[15]
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