If Blackberry Smoke have been beaten down by 2020, you’d never know it from this performance. Perhaps it helps that it’s their fourth livestream this year, and that they’re back on home turf, playing their eighth annual Holiday Homecoming show in Atlanta’s ornate Tabernacle Theatre – this time, without an audience.
Tonight they play their 2012 album The Whippoorwill in full alongside other songs, taking the show to nearly two hours but it flies by. Led by the wryly funny Charlie Starr, whose full-throated drawl doesn’t falter, the five core band members are joined by guitarist Benji Shanks, percussionist Preston Holcomb, and two glorious-voiced backing singers whose supercharged enthusiasm is infectious. And no wonder: it’s hard not to have your spirits raised by Blackberry Smoke’s boogiebased, southern-rooted rock’n’roll.