Big Daddy Wilson Deep In My Soul CD

The American South casts a powerful spell. The sons and daughters of those deep states might stray from their hometowns, make their fortunes and families overseas. But wherever they roam, the South is there under their skin – and one day it will call them home.

So it was with Deep In My Soul: the album that lured Big Daddy Wilson from his base in Europe back to the US motherland. "It was like a homecoming," he says. "To take it back home like this, back to my roots, was very sweet and special."

Wilson is not the same man who left a quarter-century ago. Born and raised in Edenton, North Carolina, the bluesman still remembers his earliest years as a "real country boy," whose family urged him to sing in church to avoid the temptations of drugs and gangs. But the epiphany came in 1979, when he enlisted in the US Army, travelled to Germany and discovered the power of live blues in the local clubs. "It was here," he says, "that I found part of me that was missing for so long in my life."