I have to admit, even after who knows how many years of listening to pop music, I still haven't overcome a prejudice. Put a single white guy on the cover of a disc with a guitar and call it blues and all I can think is, 'Great another guitar hero, just what the world needs'.

Patently unfair and completely without any sort of basis in fact, it means a disc with that type of cover is going to have to do something special right from the first song in order to catch my attention. So when Corey Stevens' latest disc Albertville showed up and had a picture of a guy leaning on his guitar on the cover… well let's just say I had concerns.

Reading his biography made me feel a litter better. He's been playing on the road for the last ten years, including a stint touring with the ultimate in Classic Rock bands ZZ Top (one of the few times I'll go along with the strange way you Americans have of saying that letter – Zed Zed Top just wouldn't cut it) and Lynard Skynyrd.

This means he's knocked around a bit and won't have many illusions left, so if he's still playing it's because he really loves the music. The other thing that captured my eye was his decision a couple years back to record an album of acoustic blues as a break from the electric blues/rock stuff he'd been playing for the prior ten years. To me that showed he was also a guy who was willing to take risks musically, which meant there was a good chance it wouldn't be the same old boring songs as an excuse for guitar solo stuff you hear you so often.

Finally there was the name of the disc, Albertville, and the fact that it was a tribute to one of my all time favourite blues players Albert King that made it really catch my attention. I had actually seen an advertisement for it and been curious as to how it sounded even before I received a copy from Corey's new label Ruf Records of Germany.

Hoping the title track, "A Real Good Sign" would be, I slipped it in. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath until I released it with the first sound of horns after three or four bars. That's when I knew I was safe – it wasn't another guitar hero album, it was a Blues album that I could settle back and enjoy without any worry about somebody's ego getting in the way of the music.

That's what great about this album, and something that is becoming harder and harder to find, you can just settle back and enjoy listening to somebody playing and loving every second. Stevens seems to remember that it's called playing for a reason and enjoys himself. It could be the six hundredth take for all we know but he is having so much fun and playing every note that even if you were in the studio you wouldn't be able to tell.