Delta Deep Down In The Delta

This two CD overview of both Hound Dog Taylor and his sidekick Brewer Phillips features some of the toughest Chicago Blues ever recorded. The legendary JSP Brewer Phillips studio album is included in its entirety. Early small label sides by Hound Dog Taylor are collected together for the first time and this set features the very first CD release of the Live At Florences recordings.

Time traveler Alvin Youngblood Hart's albums have darted from crusty Delta fingerpicking and hollering to Hendrixian hellfire to crunchy, primal rockin' blues, all with the ring of authority that comes from complete commitment to the music. This time, he's set the wayback machine to the early '30s, using guitars, mandolin, banjo, and a lot of heart to interpret tunes by Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Leadbelly, and others. Somehow, the dust of old Mississippi, the state where the Oakland-born musician now resides, seems to have gotten into his blood. Hart sounds like Parchman Farm's newest inmate as he wails and moans through "How Long Before I Can Change My Clothes," plucking notes from a National resonator guitar. Chiming out chords and quick runs on banjo, he makes Odetta's "Chilly Winds" seem like they're carrying the voices of lost ghosts, recounting their lives of misery under Jim Crow's wing. Hart tends to take many of these classics, like Patton's "Tom Rushen Blues" and Leadbelly's "Alberta," at slightly slower tempos, which gives him more time to squeeze gut emotions from his lightly graveled phrases and lets his pluck-and-drone playing work its hypnotic effect. Stark and impressive for the power Hart generates alone, this may be the acoustic blues album of the year.

Pianist Pinetop Perkins is one of the true originals. With his 100th birthday on the not-too-distant horizon, he is one of the last blues musicians who can legitimately claim direct roots in the Delta blues of the 1930s - a period that spawned such giants as Robert Johnson, Honeyboy Edwards and other titans of the of the deep South who laid the foundation for the blues as we know them today...