The music of bluesman Jimmy Reed was one of the notable influences on the nascent Rolling Stones in the early 1960s. And even if Ronnie Wood didn’t become a Stone until the late 1970s, it’s clear from his new album, Mr. Luck – A Tribute To Jimmy Reed: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, that he loves Reed’s music and honors its place in the history of the Stones, and of the blues in general.

This album, a recording of a 2013 performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London, is a more single-minded effort than the Stones’ 2016 album, Blue and Lonesome. That album of blues covers, a high point of the Stones’ later years, included 12 songs by eight authors—including Reed, whose “Little Rain” got the Stones’ treatment.

On A Tribute to Jimmy Reed, 16 of the 18 tracks were either written or cowritten by popularized by Reed (the latter category highlighted by perhaps his best-known song, “Big Boss Man”). Reed, a Mississippi-born bluesman who had his greatest successes in the late 1950s and through the ’60s, died in 1976 at 50.

Reed’s body of work, which straddles blues and rhythm-and-blues, is relatively diverse for the genre, from the shuffle of “Bright Lights, Big City” to the faster boogie of “Shame Shame Shame” and “I’m That Man Down There.”

A Tribute to Jimmy Reed is, for the most part, a showcase for Wood and Mick Taylor, the man Wood replaced in the Stones. Wood is game, and his playing is what you’ve come to expect, including some slide work on “Good Lover” and “I’m Going Upside Your Head.”

But it’s Taylor, whose playing is more rooted in the blues than Wood’s ever was, that provides most of the blues feel here, by turns stinging and slippery. They get some nifty help from pianist Ben Waters. On the frequent guitar “duels” between Wood and Taylor, it’s Taylor’s bluesy licks—perhaps best shown here on “Bright Lights”—that both meld with and play off of Wood’s rougher, more rock-oriented playing. That interplay makes for most of this album’s highlights.

Wood’s vocals sound like they’ve always sounded on his solo albums, raw, shaky and good-timey. It’s a similar story with his harmonica work on several of these songs. Wood will never be confused with Little Walter, but his harp work adds flavor to a show that gets over far more on feel than on sheer power or creativity. This is classic music, and Wood treats it with reverence, and not slavish imitation.

Taylor is listed as a “featured” player on this album, even though he appears on all but the first cut (a Wood-penned introduction) and the last, “Ghost of a Man,” a studio track Wood wrote and dedicated to Reed and his songs, rueing his downfall (“The bottle would send him to his knees, every time  … but us boys won’t forget him”). Woof plays all instruments on that one.

There are other guests, notably R&B/soul man Bobby Womack, who joins in on vocals and guitar on “Big Boss Man” and “Bright Lights, Big City;” Mick Hucknall, the onetime Simply Red (and Rod Stewart fill-in on latter-day Faces performances) on vocals on “Got No Where to Go,” and Paul Weller (of the Jam and the Style Council), who contributes vocals and nifty guitar on “Shame Shame Shame.”

This is the second such tribute album that Wood has headed up. In 2019, he and his Wild Five band released Mad Lad, honoring Chuck Berry. And as with that one, A Tribute To Jimmy Reed is short on originality, but long on heart, and with strong guitar work by Stones past and present in the service of sturdy songs.

Follow journalist Sam Richards at Twitter.com/samrichardsWC.