Club Dogo King OF The Jungle

This box set is the ultimate pop collection, 43 albums featuring many of the biggest hits performed on the legendary pop music chart BBC TV programme Top of the Pops, which ran for a record shattering 42 years from January 1964 to July 2006! The show totalled an amazing 2205 episodes and at its peak attracted 15 million viewers per week! This complete set features a total of 875 tracks, including over 600 top ten hits and over 150 number one's!

Over-glossed R&B tracks, heavy doses of keyboards and drum programming are an ideal way to make albums for the pop charts, but for B.B. King, they are tools of disaster. Lyrically and vocally the album holds up rather well. …

Double-CD compilation that includes all three of the albums King recorded for Leon Russell's Shelter label in the early 1970s, as well as some other cuts (half a dozen of which were previously unissued) recorded around the same period. King's vocal and guitar-playing skills remained intact when he joined Shelter, but these recordings aren't among his best. That's partially because he was playing with rock-oriented sidemen, and partially because the material - divided between covers of blues standards, contemporary rock and soul items, and songs written by Leon Russell - wasn't especially exciting or sympathetic. Most crucial was the near-total absence of material from the pen of King himself. Although this set isn't bad, when you want to turn to classic King, you'll go elsewhere, particularly to the sides he recorded for the King label in the '60s.

These 17 tunes come from King's most fertile period, his 1966-68 tenure at Memphis's Stax Records. Stax chief Jim Stewart had been reluctant to sign blues artists because he felt straight blues wouldn't mesh with Stax's patented Memphis soul. Ironically, the fusion of King's sharp guitar wails with the dynamic rhythms of Booker T. & the MGs - the Stax house band - was what set King apart from other bluesmen. The unique blend produced classic after classic: Booker T. Jones' rolling piano propels "Laundromat Blues." Al Jackson's drum shuffle supports "Crosscut Saw." The driving horns of Andrew Love, Wayne Jackson, and Joe Arnold accent "Born Under a Bad Sign." King's ripe and mellow vocals are a perfect match for the soul-drenched music while his dramatic string bends leap out.

King of the Highway is the first solo release from blues harp wailer Norton Buffalo and his band, the Knockouts, since the release of 1978's Desert Horizon. Norton Buffalo is an in-demand studio musician who has played on numerous sessions in all genres of music, highlighted by his involvement with blues slide guitarist Roy Rogers. The majority of King of the Highway is enjoyable (while occasionally predictable) straight-ahead modern blues mixed at times with an occasional hint of New Orleans zydeco rhythm courtesy of Buffalo's unamplificated harmonica. One of the main strengths of this 13 track Blind Pig date is the loose feeling brought by friends including Elvin Bishop, Steve Miller (Buffalo has been a member of his band for 25 years), and Merl Saunders, gathering together simply to jam.

This excellent companion volume to Founder of the Delta Blues pulls together 23 more Patton tracks (including some alternate takes that were for years thought to be lost) to give a much more complete look at this amazing artist. It's interesting here to compare the tracks from his final session to his halcyon output from 1929. Highlights include "Mean Black Cat Blues," Patton's adaption of "Sitting on Top of the World" ("Some Summer Day") and both parts of "Prayer of Death," originally issued under the non de plume of "Elder J.J. Hadley." The sound on this collection is vastly superior, from a noise-reduction standpoint, to its companion volume.