Brownie Mcghee

As a genre, blues music was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by rural black musicians. They shaped it with brilliant inspiration from disparate elements of black song. By the early 1920's, recorded urban performers solidified the standard three-verse, 12 bar meter structure that has identified most blues. Fortunately, during that same period , there were recorded musicians who grew up with the blues and whose guitar-styles were more fluid and improvisational.

JSP's Shake That Thing: East Coast Blues compiles four CD's of performances by country blues pickers Gabriel Brown, Dan Pickett, and Ralph Willis. It's hard to go wrong with these 105 obscure recordings cut between 1935 and 1953. The tracks have been remastered, making the majority of this material sound great. Unlike other packages of this type, the liner notes are informative; listing personnel, dates, and concise history without going on ad nauseam. As an extra bonus this is a budget-priced set making it highly recommended, for both the collector and the blues novice

The West of veteran TV writer/Deadwoodcreator David Milch is as grim as it is gritty, sprinkled with salty dialogue and punctuated by sudden brutality and raw sexuality. The original soundtrack cues by composer David Schwartz (represented here by his evocative show theme), Michael Brook and Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek play off that vision with often stark rootsiness. But it's the series' rich slate of songs – choices whose inventiveness often rivals that of The Sopranos – that consistently reinforce its all-too-human drama, if not the crusty veneer. This collection gathers the best songs from the series' first season, coloring the milieu with evocative hillbilly romps like Michael Hurley's "Hog of the Forsaken" and the a capella grace of Margaret's Native American "Creek Lullaby." But the collection's musical eclecticism stretches far beyond mere genre concerns, variously encompassing the nascent jazz of Jelly Roll Morton (a rollicking "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Delta blues of Bukka White and Mississippi John Hurt and even Gustavo Santaolalla's hypnotic Brazilian fretwork. But the collection's country and folk-tinged performances are its most resonant, whether invoking earthy traditions (the gospel fervor of the late June Carter Cash's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee's more heretical "God and Man") or more contemporary stylings like Lyle Lovett's "Old Friend" and the gentle "Twisted Little Man" by Michael J. Sheehy.

John Oates is having a full-circle moment after leveraging a canny mix of new-wave soul to reach multi-platinum heights with Daryl Hall in the '80s. His sixth solo album is titled Reunion, but if anything it's a homecoming with Oates' former self. This is the John Oates from before Hall and Oates, the one who wrote two songs and co-wrote four others on 1972's jangly Whole Oats. You may associate him with flashy MTV videos, but the first things we heard from Oates featured pedal steel. His similarly rootsy turn as a solo artist has echoes in the past.