Martin Scorsese The Blues

Sizzling tracks from across his career: his performances on All Your Love John Mayall's Bluesbreakers; Rockin' Daddy Howlin' Wolf; Rollin' and Tumblin' Cream; Crossroads (live) Derek and the Dominos; Mean Old World Eric Clapton and Duane Allman and more!

While 2002's Essential Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble is the place to go for the complete picture, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Stevie Ray Vaughan works well as a nice single-disc introduction to the work of the influential blues guitarist. Perhaps a few more hits could have been included to make this more attractive to the curious buyer, but with a previously unreleased live version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and a track listing that dodges much of the 1995 Greatest Hits collection, this does offer an alternative for longtime fans.

The box set attempts to present a history of the blues from the dawning of recorded music to the present day. It offers a survey of many different blues sub-genres and tangential music styles, as well as a survey of almost all the most notable blues performers over time. In 2004, the box set won two Grammy Awards for "Best Historical Album" and "Best Album Notes." That same year it was #2 on Billboard's Top Blues Albums chart.

This five-disc, 116-track box set presents a sweeping history of the blues from its emergence in the early 1900s clear through to its various contemporary guises, and includes samples of country blues in all of its regional variations, as well as cuts from string bands, jug bands, jazz combos, gritty Chicago blues outfits, and a look at how rock artists like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix incorporated the blues into their distinctive styles. Intelligently gathered and arranged, it treats the blues both from a historical perspective and from a working assumption that the form is still alive and well, continually morphing and transforming itself. There simply isn't a better or deeper survey of the blues on the market.

This collection spotlights the great Delta bluesman Son House at three distinct points in his life. Included here are three of his 78s issued in the 1930s by Paramount Records, several of the Library of Congress field recordings done by Alan Lomax in 1941-1942, and a sampling of rediscovered 1960s concert pieces, including a riveting version of Blind Willie Johnson's "John the Revelator." All of this material is available elsewhere, but having examples of these different eras all on one disc makes this set a nice introduction to the full sweep of House's recorded legacy.

This collection spotlights the great Delta bluesman Son House at three distinct points in his life. Included here are three of his 78s issued in the 1930s by Paramount Records, several of the Library of Congress field recordings done by Alan Lomax in 1941-1942, and a sampling of rediscovered 1960s concert pieces, including a riveting version of Blind Willie Johnson's "John the Revelator." All of this material is available elsewhere, but having examples of these different eras all on one disc makes this set a nice introduction to the full sweep of House's recorded legacy.

The occasion of the series of television films broadcast under the umbrella title The Blues in the fall of 2003 provided the opportunity to compile the highlights of Keb' Mo''s recording career thus far into a single-disc collection. One might argue that, with only four regular albums under his belt (there was also a children's album, Big Wide Grin), Keb' Mo' wasn't quite ready for a best-of, but those albums attracted a wide audience among blues fans; each one lodged in the Top Five of Billboard's Top Blues Albums chart, and the second and third, Just Like You and Slow Down, won Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues Album. Actually, it's the self-titled first album from 1994 that is the most impressive (as well as the least "contemporary"), and six tracks from it have been excerpted here, with three from Just Like You, four from Slow Down, and one from the fourth album, The Door…

Rounder's four-CD Box of the Blues is, by looking at its inclusion of tracks, seemingly an ambitious proposition. But looks can be deceiving. Compiled and introduced by vice president of A&R Scott Billington - a man whose credentials, when it comes to fighting for and preserving blues traditions, are unassailable - these discs become a kind of theme-oriented blur of Rounder's substantial catalog holdings. Billington's schemata are quirky, sometimes ironic, and sometimes downright scary and profound as the set's first and second discs' "61 Highway" and "One More Mile" attest. The first CD concentrates its energies on the revelation of blues as it came up from the Mississippi Delta in the music of Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines, Etta Baker, Blind Willie McTell, John Hurt, and others and mutated up north to Chicago with Otis Spann, Robert Nighthawk, and others…