82 year old blues legend, B.B. King is about to release a rootsy new album (we’ve lost count how many albums he’s released in his career, and suspect he has too…). Due out on 26th August through Geffen, T Bone Burnett is lending his production skills to this work.

(Seems we’re talking a lot about T Bone these days, from his work with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss to his musical direction on the Walk The Line soundtrack)

Burnett says that he wanted to get B.B. back to his roots and resisted the temptation to try and give the bluesman a contemporary slant:

I saw B.B. at the Central Forest Ballroom in Dallas in ‘65 or something like that. I remembered exactly how that felt and how that sounded, so I wanted to go back and sort of re-create that very live sound. We all cut it just sitting around in a circle. I tried to be very true to who he was when I first heard him and that energy — in other words, not try to update him in any way.

Of course, with the release of One Kind Favor, King is showing no signs of slowing down – there’s a B.B. King Museum being opened in his honour, he’s touring and in September he’ll begin hosting a weekly blues radio show on XM Satellite Radio. Phew!

The tracklist for One Kind Favor runs as follows:

1. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean (Lemon Jefferson)
2. I Get So Weary (T-Bone Walker)
3. Get These Blues Off Me (Lee Vida Walker)
4. How Many More Years (Chester Burnett)
5. Waiting For Your Call (Oscar Lollie)
6. My Love Is Down (Lonnie Johnson)
7. The World Is Gone Wrong (Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon)
8. Blues Before Sunrise (John Lee Hooker)
9. Midnight Blues (John Willie “Shifty” Henry)
10. Backwater Blues (Big Bill Broonzy)
11. Sitting On Top Of The World (Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon)
12. Tomorrow Night (Lonnie Johnson)

Anyone feeling like a slice of old-school blues?