This is by far the best and most comprehensive introduction to recorded
blues ever assembled, drawing styles, record labels, and eras together
with the efficiency of a spider’s web.
These five discs-tied to the hit-and-miss PBS film series Martin Scorsese
Presents the Blues-embrace field hollers, early queens Ma Rainey and
Bessie Smith, the music’s first composer W.C. Handy, Delta slide
guitarists, string bands, piano barrelhousers, jazz geniuses Count Basie
and Lionel Hampton, Texas hotshots, lyric poets Percy Mayfield and Willie
Dixon, Chicago powerhouses from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy,
Howlin’ Wolf and howling white boys, soulkittens Etta James and Janis
Joplin, juke joint brawlers like Hound Dog Taylor, African torchbearer
Ali Farka Toure, modern guitar heroes Stevie Ray Vaughan and Luther
Allison, and even recent hit-makers Peggy Scott-Adams and Susan
Tedeschi. And that’s just a smidgen of the talents represented across
more than 100 cuts.
Nonetheless, there are grave omissions in disc five, which focuses on
contemporary blues. The raw electric sound of present-day Mississippi,
embodied by R.L. Burnside and other artists on the Fat Possum label, has
done much to open the ears of college-age audiences and should be
included. Also absent are the music’s most important contemporary
innovators: Afro-blues fusionist Corey Harris, psychedelic folk bluesman
Otis Taylor and rap-blues proselytizer Chris Thomas King. Still, it’s
obvious this collection is a work of devotion and intelligence as well
as commerce.
Historical Significance:
Reviewers and collectors regard the set as an essential document
rather than a standard greatest-hits package. It highlights the raw,
amplified post-war blues recorded on the Aristocrat and early Chess
labels that directly informed British and American rock pioneers of
the 1960s.
Audio and Material:
The collection rescues rare and early sides from blues masters. It
showcases transitional guitar licks, driving rhythms, and harmonica
work that shifted rural delta blues into the high-energy urban
electric format....
This is a huge collection encompassing all genres, so please don't be
outraged to find Blues artists as well as Jazz, Country, Pop, Latin,
... gathered in this single Blues repertoire so as not to scatter
these albums.
Thank you for your understanding!
Non-Blues/Jazz album covers will be reduced in size for quicker
differentiation.
For the moment, only some of the Blues albums are here, but the rest
will follow in due course...
The Blues originated in African-American communities of, primarily,
the “Deep South” of the United States towards the end of the 19th
century. This collection compiles 16 complete blues LPs, all of them
classics in their own right, which serve as an easy introduction to
the genre. Most of them were recorded between the mid-1950s and the
early 1960s, when recording techniques had advanced significantly
with respect to previous years. Represented here are some of the
best figures of the blues world, heard on some of the finest LPs of
the genre.
George Mitchell was born in Coral Gables, Florida in 1944. He was raised
in Atlanta, Georgia and in 1958 discovered by accident the two radio
stations in Atlanta that played black music, WAOK, and WERD, the first
black-owned station in the US. Mitchell was drawn to black music, and as a
teenager listened intently to Samuel B. Charters' anthology The Country
Blues. He also went to blues and R&B shows and saw Bo Diddley, Jimmy
Reed, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and the Staple Singers with his
grandmother in tow; they were the only white people at that
performance. Mitchell first recorded in Memphis in 1962 just to have something
to listen to. He and some friends recorded Furry Lewis, Gus Canon, Will
Shade, Charlie Burse, Laura Dukes, and Catherine Porter. This was the
start of a career devoted to recording blues musicians.
In 1963, he located and recorded the early Atlanta legends, Peg Leg
Howell and Buddy Moss. Also in 1963, he worked in Chicago for Delmark
Records and, with Michael Bloomfield, produced concerts at the Fickle
Pickle, bringing in both unknown blues artists and re-locating such
bluesmen as Washboard Sam. Recordings of these concerts have been issued
extensively.
In the summer of 1967 Mitchell traveled with his wife Cathy and a
Wollensack tape recorder and borrowed a 35mm camera from the University of
Minnesota to document blues musicians in Mississippi. After returning to
Minnesota Mitchell turned the trip into a master's thesis that also became
his first book in 1971, Blow My Blues Away. They had recorded legends Fred
McDowell and Houston Stackhouse, and at the time unknowns R.L. Burnside
and Othar Turner.
Beginning in 1976 Mitchell took a job for the Bureau of Cultural Affairs
in Atlanta to oversee the Georgia Grassroots Music Festival. Mitchell was
able to travel across the state and document folk musicians native to the
state and hire a staff to do field work. He curated the Festival for three
years and in that time recorded such musicians as James Davis, Precious
Bryant, James Lee Ziegler, and Willie Guy Raines.
From 1979 to 1981 he worked as a field researcher for the Columbus Museum
of Art in Columbus, Georgia, for In Celebration of a Legacy, a project
initiated by folklorist Fred Fussell. A book by that name by Mitchell and
a double record album from his field recordings were published by the
Museum and re-published and currently available from the Chattahoochee
Historic Commission.
In Atlanta in 1984 George Mitchell created the National Downhome Blues
Festival which was held at the Moonshadow Saloon. The three-day festival
was the largest gathering of old-time blues musicians before or since. A
one-hour program of performances and interviews held on these three days
was broadcast on PBS; in addition a 4 record LP was released by
Southland.
After field recording Mitchell focused on his other passion, photography.
He taught high school students in Atlanta helping them produce the
photography book Sweet Auburn: the Many Faces of Atlanta's Most Historic
Avenue.
The Living the Blues collection has proved to be a popular set, perhaps
more so in Europe (where the volumes were 2-CD sets) than in the U.S. The
different volumes cover a vast time period from the 1920s to the 1990s,
making it perhaps one of the broadest blues sets ever produced.
NEW!
Living The Blues-CD18 Blues Classics (Chicago) @320
"American Epic" compilation series is a collection of releases of music
associated with the film series "The American Epic", a historical
documentaries are a journey back in time to the "Big Bang" of modern popular
music.
In the 1920s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies
were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles
and markets. Ranging the mountains, prairies, rural villages, and urban
ghettos of America, they discovered a wealth of unexpected talent. The
recordings they made of all the ethnic groups of America democratized the
nation and gave a voice to everyone. Country singers in the Appalachians,
Blues guitarists in the Mississippi Delta, Gospel preachers across the
south, Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana, Tejano groups from the Texas Mexico
border, Native American drummers in Arizona, and Hawaiian musicians were all
recorded. For the first time, a woman picking cotton in Mississippi, a
coalminer in Virginia or a tobacco farmer in Tennessee could have their
thoughts and feelings heard on records played in living rooms across the
country. It was the first time America heard itself.
This is not "remastering", in the normal sense, but something closer to
fine art restoration. The intent is not for people to marvel at the
antiquity of these discs, but rather to experience them as vital, immediate
performances that speak to us as directly as they did on the day they were
recorded—not simply great art for their time, but great art for all times.
Engineer Nicholas Bergh has reassembled this recording system from original
parts and it is now the only one left in the world. The system consists of a
single microphone, a towering six-foot amplifier rack, and a live
record-cutting lathe, powered by a weight-driven pulley system of clockwork
gears. The musicians have roughly three minutes to record their song direct
to disc before the weight hits the floor. In the 1920s, they called this
"catching lightning in a bottle".
Texas slide guitarist and gospel bluesman Blind Willie Johnson recorded
only 30 songs over the course of his life as a preacher and street
performer. Even so, the savvy combination of his gritty and powerful "chest
voice" singing style coupled with his mastery of slide guitar (some report
he regularly used a knife as a slide) has given him a notably influential
legacy, specifically with later bluesmen Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson.
His tune "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was selected for Carl
Sagan's Voyager probe Golden Record, the Library of Congress as well as the
National Recording.
NEW!
Music From The American Epic Sessions (2CD-Deluxe)
Alan Lomax was the son of the folklorist John Lomax, whose primary focus
was cowboy songs, although he and Alan worked together for the Library of
Congress. Howard Odum was another notable folklorist who focused on
African-American folk songs.
The son of revered folklorist John Lomax, Alan started out recording the
songs of prisoners in the south, and later worked at the Library of
Congress as a folklorist with his father. He attended Harvard University,
Columbia University, and the University of Texas.
Lomax is probably best known, though, for his extensive interviewing of
artists like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, and others for
the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture.
In addition to focusing on the folk music of the American south, Lomax
also chronicled plenty of Irish folk music, as well as other folk music
from Italy and elsewhere around the world. In the mid-to-late 1950s, he
traveled around the south recording folk artists and folk songs for a
collection eventually published by Atlantic records, called Songs of the
South. These tunes were later put to work in the film O Brother, Where Art
Thou?
Lomax was also under suspicion of being a communist during the McCarthy
era, when he left the country and spent some time in Europe studying folk
music. Encyclopedia Brittanica calls him "one of the most dedicated and
knowledgeable folk-music scholars of the 20th century." Along with his
sister Bess, he was a member of the groundbreaking labor rights group the
Almanac Singers.
Lomax has received awards from the Library of Congress, the National Book
Critics Circle, and the Grammy Trustees.
NEW!
VA-Alan Lomax's American Patchwork (2LP) @FLAC24-48
Acoustic Sounds' Own In-House Original Label - APO Records Looking for the
real blues? That authentic blues that makes your spine tingle? Well,
you've found it. APO Records has but one goal - to capture deep, true
blues through audiophile recordings.
From world-renowned Blue Heaven Studios, a church-turned-recording
studio, to our choice in mastering, to our in-house pressing plant -
Quality Record Pressings - down to the stock of paper and printing quality
we choose for our deluxe album booklets, APO Records consistently spends
more to bring deserving artists exceptional records. In addition to
authentic blues, APO has recorded a couple of female vocal titles by Nancy
Bryan and a jazz title by Myra Taylor.
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
-Front.jpg)
