Blues Classics

This is a well-organized, smartly chosen 20-track compilation of some of the lesser-known early Mississippi blues artists. Garfield Akers is about the most famous, which tells you right there how obscure most of these names - King Solomon Hill, Otto Virgial, Mattie Delaney, Joe Calicott, Blind Joe Reynolds, John D. Fox and others - are to the general listening public. It's quality material, however, and not in a drastically different league than the most renowned classics by singers like Tommy Johnson and Son House. The guitar playing and singing are emotional and inventive throughout, but standouts include Mattie Delaney, Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, some of the relatively few guitar-playing Delta blueswomen who recorded; Wiley's minor-key, doomy "Last Kind Words" is particularly affecting.

Broke, Black & Blue delivers multiple surprises within its 100 songs of prewar blues. Arranged chronologically by Joop Visser, the set admirably covers the first 22 years of recorded blues, 1924 to 1946, from vaudeville and Delta to boogie-woogie and jump blues. It's a swell gift for anyone wanting to learn more about the history of blues. But old-timers will be pleased, too, as special attention has been paid to culling rare and idiosyncratic tracks by the well-known and the obscure. The first three discs present single tracks by artists as diverse as the Memphis Jug Band, De Ford Bailey, Tommy Johnson, Son House, Skip James, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lonnie Johnson, and Bukka White, alongside unknowns such as Isaiah "The Mississippi Moaner" Nelson, Barbecue Bob and Laughing Charley, Ed Andrews, Chicken Wilson, and Bumble Bee Slim. On the fourth disc, this convention is jettisoned to luxuriate in a series of very rare sides of lovely, oddly subdued boogie-woogie and jump blues by Jimmie Gordon, Johnny Temple, and Lee Brown.

It's appropriate that the great Freddy King is pictured on the disk cover; he's got two of his best on the album: "Hide Away" and "Have You Ever Loved a Woman", the latter surely one of the most searing and emotionally impassioned performances in the entire blues pantheon. This disk is absolutely crammed with bonafide blues classics from the likes of Howling Wolf, Elmore James, Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Earl Hooker, and B.B. King.

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.