Lil Ray Neal, pictured at Teddy’s Juke Joint. Photos by Stephanie Landry
After years of playing with blues legends, 55-year-old musician preps new album
Editor’s note:After publishing this story in our September issue, 225 learned that Lil Ray Neal will be honored in October at the annual Baton Rouge Blues Foundation gala. Neal will receive the first-ever Red Stick Blues Award at the event, Oct. 22, 6 p.m.-11 p.m. at the East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library on Goodwood Boulevard. Click here for more information.
At the bottom of the story, check out a video of Neal paying tribute to B.B. King, who will also be recognized at the gala.
Lil Ray Neal sits in his home studio. Surrounded by his electric guitars, he remembers the peak of blues in Baton Rouge.
“We talking about in the late ’80s to early ’90s,” he says. “I made a living when I came home off the road. If I was home for two or three weeks, I would play in Baton Rouge. Tabby Thomas had a club. My father had a club. There were clubs all over.”
Today, Neal is 55 years old. Over the years, he’s played as a backing guitarist to the late legends Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters and B.B. King. He’s traveled the world and back again at least three times.
“If I had to do it all over again, there are a few changes I would make, but I would still be a blues musician,” he says. “A lot of people wouldn’t even play music. It’s from the heart with me.”
Today, he’s done playing backup. To ignite his career reinvention as the leader of the band, Neal is preparing a new album, Nothing But the Blues, that he’s hoping to finish by year’s end. He is also lining up local and nationwide shows.
The comeback is not without its challenges: the sparse crowds, the lack of knowledge of what he calls the “true blues” and the lack of venues.
“In Mississippi and Memphis, you have blues seven nights a week,” he says. “Here in Baton Rouge, we just don’t have the clubs.”
But even with those roadblocks in front of him, he’s optimistic about his future.
“I think the blues could come back,” he says. “We’ve got enough people who love the blues. It just takes a helluva blues player to fill a venue now. I’m going to stick with it because everything comes around again. I might be the old guy by then, in my 70s, but that blues will be coming back around, and I’ll be here.”
The sound of the true blues
Lil Ray Neal describes the sound of the “true blues” as a tone. He uses a gold-top Gibson electric guitar he’s been playing since 1984 and a Fender Vibrolux amplifier. He sets the amp volume at 7, which is pretty loud. But, he uses knobs on the guitar to control feedback, volume and tone of the notes he’s playing. He never uses drive or distortion. “I got a different tone from anybody,” he says. “I’ve never changed.”
Playing with visionaries
What Lil Ray Neal learned from B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Bobby Bland, in his own words
Discipline. I was a musician first. I look at a lot of guitar players. When these guys come up and begin to get their little band, they never learn the ropes of how to survive and what to do on the bandstand to be a professional player all their life. You come up under Muddy, Bobby and B.B., you’re not going to drink, and you’re not going to have what they call “baggage.”
I learned how to be able to play with anybody. I was able to adapt and play just as good as anybody else. I listened. I see guitar players now, and you take them, put them in someone else’s band, and they can’t play. You learn with these leaders and do what they want you to do as a musician. It’s a job, working for them.
