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.
The 1920s “classic era” of recorded blues was dominated by women who lived and performed in the cities. This Rough Guide explores its glitzy heyday when singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey became the first real stars of the blues.
The blues recording industry began in New York City and for most of the 1920s, musicians travelled from all parts of the country to make their mark in the recording studio. Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were amongst the most popular female singers but they were soon rivaled by the likes of Lonnie Johnson, Robert ‘Barbecue Bob’ Hicks, Texas Alexander and Mississippi John Hurt. Kansas Joe McCoy cut ‘When The Levee Breaks’, justly famous in its Led Zeppelin incarnation, in the city.
A chronological history of jazz vocal presented by André Francis and Jean Schwarz. 10 CDs with more than 12 hours of music.
The resulting 2 boxed sets of 10 CDs in each, unlike any other available today, groups together the main vocalists in the story of jazz from the first half of the 20th century. Each of these 20 CDs offers in more or less the same proportion, the purest of African-American song with gospel and blues singers, from truculent Ma Rainey to majestic Bessie Smith, sophisticated Sarah Vaughan to popular Louis Prima, the folk-related tones of Charlie Patton to the honeyed voice of Frank Sinatra.