Essential Recordings

Roomful of Blues is an American blues and swing revival big band based in Rhode Island. With a recording career that spans over 50 years, they have toured worldwide and recorded many albums. Roomful of Blues, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, "Swagger, sway and swing with energy and precision". Since 1967, the group’s blend of swing, rock and roll, jump blues, boogie-woogie and soul has earned it five Grammy Award nominations and many other accolades, including seven Blues Music Awards (with a victory as Blues Band Of The Year in 2005). Billboard called the band "a tour de force of horn-fried blues…Roomful is so tight and so right." The Down Beat International Critics Poll has twice selected Roomful of Blues as Best Blues Band.

The IPO has recorded a significant repertoire of masterworks during the years. In this special anniversary tribute album, you can find a representative selection of some of the orchestra’s best recordings of the last 50 years.

Three CD collection from the vaults of the legendary Sun Records label - 60 indispensable tracks from golden era. In 1950, Sam Phillips started his Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue. In the following dozen or so years, Phillips unearthed and recorded an unprecedented array of talent. Pioneering electric bluesmen were the first to arrive - Howlin' Wolf and Little Junior Parker. Then a quietly spoken electrical company employee, one Elvis Presley, walked in and helped Sam change the face of the 20th century by inventing Rock 'n' Roll. The King was followed through the door by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich to make Sun one of the greatest record labels ever.

A gentle blues songster with an impressive acoustic guitar style, Mississippi John Hurt made a handful of wonderful recordings for OKeh Records over a pair of sessions in 1928, but he never developed a professional career and dropped from sight shortly afterwards. Hurt was rediscovered in 1965 during the folk and blues revival, and the considerable guitar skills and gentle vocal approach that highlighted his 1928 recordings were still very much intact. He recorded four albums for Vanguard (one of them was actually a concert recording made at Oberlin College in 1965) in the mid-'60s, each of them a pure delight. This brief sampler of his rediscovery recordings includes fine versions of such traditional country blues fare as "Candy Man," "Louis Collins," and "Spike Driver Blues" as well as Hurt's personal calling card, "Avalon Blues"…