Review of the DVD, “I Shall Continuum: Live in Greenwich Village”

A healthy visual dose of just some of the delightfully eccentric facets and niches of Baby Gramps’ mainly manic mu-sical personality. Out of the Pacific North-west, he’s part ragtime, hokum and coun-try bluesman, poet, medicine show min-strel, songster and professional boxcar bum with a fondness for old (and often forgot-ten) folk, vaudeville and novelty numbers, corny jokes and the dictionary. Imagine a combination of Uncle Dave Macon, Cap-tain Beefheart, Charley Patton, Smoky Sto-ver, Blind Boy Fuller and Popeye and you’d be in the park. Recorded recently at New York City’s Terra Blues club, the bearded, foot-stomp-ing Gramps is as animated as ever, support-ing his raspy, gravelly, mannerism-loaded vocal gymnastics with a National steel gui-tar approach that seems to contain a theat-rical exploration of all the notes between the cracks, often employing a percussive finger-picking technique that involves el-bows