Whitesnake celebrates the blues sound that helped inspire its multi-platinum career on a new collection that features remixed and remastered versions of the group’s best blues-rock songs. THE BLUES ALBUM is the third and final release in the band’s Red, White and Blues Trilogy, a series of compilations organized by musical themes that began this year with LOVE SONGS (red) and The ROCK Album (white).
Memphis was the town blues musicians passed through on their way to Chicago. But some of them stayed and the record companies sent their mobile units to record them. Over a three-year period from 1927, an astonishing amount of talent was recorded: local stars like the Memphis Jug Band, Frank Stokes, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, Jim Jackson, Furry Lewis, Robert Wilkins, Bukka White, Memphis Minnie, Joe Callicott and Sleepy John Estes.
People call Chicago The Home Of The Blues. It may not be where the blues came from but it s where the blues came to live. It’s the place where Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed laid down the songs that inspired the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. The blues was the bedrock on which Jimmy Page created Led Zeppelin, the band that helped to change pop music forever. Chicago was the mecca for Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Elmore James and a host of others who arrived in the city to make their fortune. The process had begun decades earlier, when record companies first came to town.
Back when the Rolling Stones were proud to be the voice of revolt and Mick Jagger was as far away from his knighthood as Zayn Malik is from a seat in the House of Lords, they were, very occasionally, modest, not to say humble. A couple years after cutting their eponymous first album in 1964, chock full of covers of blues and rhythm and blues songs by black artists including a buzz-toned slice of anthropomorphism about our favourite honey-making insect, Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine: “You could say that we did blues to turn people on, but why they would be turned on by us is unbelievably stupid. I mean what's the point in listening to us doing ‘I’m a King Bee’ when you can hear Slim Harpo do it?”
Whitesnake celebrates the blues sound that helped inspire its multi-platinum career on a new collection that features remixed and remastered versions of the group’s best blues-rock songs. THE BLUES ALBUM is the third and final release in the band’s Red, White and Blues Trilogy, a series of compilations organized by musical themes that began this year with LOVE SONGS (red) and The ROCK Album (white). All the tracks on THE BLUES ALBUM have been revisited, remixed, and remastered. Whitesnake’s singer-songwriter David Coverdale says, the music reflects how blues artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the three Kings (Albert, B.B. and Freddie) continue to inspire him. In the album’s liner notes, he writes: “It’s hard to find the words to show how profoundly they connected with my soul. But ‘blues’ to me is a beautiful word that describes emotional expression… feelings, be it feelings of sadness, loneliness, emptiness… but, also those that express great joy, celebration and dance, sexiness and Love!!!”