Keb’ Mo’ Redefines Family With His ‘Grin’

“Kiddie music” isn’t Keb’ Mo’s thing. Making a children’s album wasn’t remotely on the to-do list of this two-time Grammy Award-winning blues artist.

When he first agreed to record for Sony Wonder, the children’s and family division of Sony Music and Epic Records, it was an “I’ll show up in the studio, then get back to my real work” kind of thing. Then he got hooked.

The unconventional result is the new release “Big Wide Grin,” an intimate celebration of life, family and the freedom to be. Soulful and spirited, with a smooth mix of blues, jazz and pop rhythms, the album was meticulously crafted not only for children, but also for teenagers and adults.

“The energy just kind of took over,” Keb’ Mo’ said from Germany, where he’s in the middle of a seven-week national and European tour. “I stopped everything to work on that record.”

He would have fun, he decided, but he would not define family “as just some ideal picture. Family is many, many different pictures. It’s the family that stays together, it’s broken homes, it’s adopted families.”

He credits then-Sony Music executive Hillary Bratton (now at Rhino Records) for lighting the spark for the album and supporting a maverick approach that included his first “ridiculous proposal” for the project: Sly & the Family Stone’s grooving 1970s funk hit “Family Affair.”

The album’s producer and his friend, musician Kevin McCormick, came up with other surprisingly apt songs that “I wouldn’t have touched in a million years,” such as the O’Jays’ soul anthem “Love Train” and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”

His hesitation “was out of fright,” Keb’ Mo’ said. The challenge was to subtly shape these iconic songs and others with his signature interpretations and stay true to what had become his vision for “Big Wide Grin.”

Other resonant song choices were Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” Chic Street Man’s “Everybody Be Yoself,” “Grandma’s Hands” by Bill Withers and “Color Him Father” by R. Lewis Spencer. Keb’ Mo’ refashioned this last, an old doo-wop hit, for just guitar and voice, stripping the song down to its loving essence and finding the album’s title and its guiding spirit in the song’s lyrics.

In a mid-album change of pace, friend and “The Practice” star Camryn Manheim joins in on a zesty blast from the distant past, “Flat Foot Floogie.”

Keb’ Mo’ wove his own songs into the mix too. He wrote “Infinite Eyes” with John Lewis Parker and Essra Mohawk as “a celebration of the bigness of life and how small we are, yet how big and important we are too.” He turned a 10-year-old effort, “Don’t Pass Go,” written with Cynthia Tarr, into “Don’t Say No,” emphasizing its playful, life-embracing spirit.

Friends who had adopted a baby inspired the deeply personal “I Am Your Mother, Too,” co-written by Zuriani and performed with guest singer Brenda Russell. An assurance of love for adopted children, it includes birth mothers in its embrace: “Your sweet young mother/ Entrusted us with you.”

“I was just taken away by how they had all become a family through this child,” Keb’ Mo’ said.

Praised for the ease of his slide guitar work and the unique layers and sensitivity of his instrumentals and vocals, Keb’ Mo’, 49, born in Compton as Kevin Moore, found his musical calling when he took band in elementary school “playing whole notes and half notes.”

His interest was unwavering and eclectic all through school, taking him from trumpet to steel drums, French horn, percussion instruments and guitar: “Wherever they would let me participate. I mean, I would play the triangle if they let me,” he said.

Music sparked a sense of purpose, so that, as a child and then a teenager, the budding musician felt free to express himself and was motivated to do his best. It was the antithesis of the school sports he wanted no part of, “the whole macho, let’s win, beat the other guys kind of mentality.”

Introspective, with a metaphysical bent, Keb’ Mo’ has strong feelings about allowing children to develop their “intuitive natures, to find out who they are.” Adults, he said, don’t realize the power of their influence at home and in the popular culture.

“I really work to not pass judgment,” he said, “but when you understand how much your words and your actions mean, you act differently. You tell your kids, ‘Don’t go in the street, look both ways, a car might be coming.’ You understand its power. But we’re wielding this great power of thought and mind and deed, and sometimes we use it carelessly.”

Introspection comes naturally to Keb’ Mo’, who struggled for years with an indifferent pop career. At the end of the 1980s, “when all had failed, when I felt that I had had every chance to make it and not made it, I decided to just do what I wanted to do.”

It was a turning point. His first recording for the historic Okeh Records blues label was 1994’s well-received self-titled “Keb’ Mo”’; subsequent albums--1996’s “Just Like You” and “Slow Down” in 1998--took Grammys for best contemporary blues album.

Keb’ Mo’s’ newest release, “The Door,” put on hold briefly when “Big Wide Grin” became more than just a job, is climbing the charts. And, not afraid to rile blues purists with his unconventional, out-of-the-box style, he’s still taking musical detours.

He joined Bob Dylan, Beck, Sheryl Crow and others on an upcoming Hank Williams tribute album; his chosen track was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He will also be heard in his “bravest undertaking of the whole year,” singing a Shakespeare sonnet for a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art benefit CD. It’s one of several musical tracks written by composer Michael Kamen; the CD includes performances by John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Annie Lennox, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others.

“Big Wide Grin,” meanwhile, is a family affair in another sense: Keb’ Mo’s’ only child, son Kevin Jr., edging toward 14, can be heard singing a piping harmony with his dad on “Big Yellow Taxi.”

“He was about 12 when he did that. It was the last,” Keb’ Mo’ said, with a touch of fatherly nostalgia, “of that high little voice.”