Jug Band

The primary impetus behind this ambitious 12-disc box set is to gather all nine of the Grateful Dead's Warner Brothers titles. However, the staggeringly high quotient of previously unissued bonus material rivals – and at times exceeds – the content of those original albums. The Golden Road (1965-1973) truly has something – and usually a lot of it – for every degree of Deadhead…

The Blues Masters series, much to Rhino`s credit, adopts an expansive definition of blues, allowing the likes of Count Basie, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters and even Louis Prima admission. There is none of the purist`s quibbling over strict 12-bar form or the relative significance of prewar and postwar styles.
What Rhino delivers instead is the blues in all its myriad guises. This music is old and new, black and white, acoustic and electric, folksy and jazzy, performed by women and men, and yet it is all still blues at its core.

This wonderful set includes four discs, 100 tracks in all, of vintage blues 78s released between 1924 and 1942 compiled by collector and archivist Neil Slaven. Each of the four discs has a theme, with the first disc presenting songs about gambling (including Peg Leg Howell's harrowing and kinetic "Skin Game Blues"), the second covering alcohol and drugs (including Tommy Johnson's immortal "Canned Heat Blues"), the third playlisting songs about jail and prison (including Bukka White's powerful "Parchman Farm Blues"), and the fourth winds things up with songs about death (including Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"). Several of the sides here will be familiar to serious fans of prewar country blues, but there are enough rare sides here, too, to make this set an archival treasure, and the themed discs help sketch out the imagined (and sometimes very real) arc of many of these players' lives and times.