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May 03, 2021 By Mark Redfern

The Black Keys (Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney) are releasing a new blues covers album, Delta Kream, on May 14 via Nonesuch. It will consist of covers of 11 Mississippi hill country blues standards that have influenced the duo growing up. Now they have shard the album’s cover of R. L. Burnside’s “Going Down South,” via a Ryan Nadzam-directed video for it. Watch it below.

Auerbach had this to say in a press release: “That was one of R.L. Burnside’s hits! We strayed a little from the original on our version with the falsetto and percussion, but we liked how it sounded in that moment. It’s become one of my favorites on the album.”

The Black Keys previously shared the album’s lead single, a cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake.”

Delta Kream, named after an iconic Mississippi photograph by William Eggleston which is featured on the cover, was recorded in Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville alongside musicians Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton.

Auerbach had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “We made this record to honor the Mississippi hill country blues tradition that influenced us starting out. These songs are still as important to us today as they were the first day Pat and I started playing together and picked up our instruments. It was a very inspiring session with Pat and me along with Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton in a circle, playing these songs. It felt so natural.”

Carney added: “The session was planned only days in advance and nothing was rehearsed. We recorded the entire album in about ten hours, over two afternoons, at the end of the ‘Let’s Rock’ tour.”

The band’s most recent album, “Let’s Rock”, came out in 2019 on Easy Eye Sound/Nonesuch.

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