Victoria Camps

That Baïlèro, a shepherd’s song from the highlands of Auvergne sung in the Occitan dialect of the area, should become a favourite with singers ranging from Victoria de los Angeles to Sarah Brightman by way of Renée Fleming and Karita Mattila, is all because of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret. As a budding composer in Paris in the 1900s, Canteloube was unable to interest himself in the various musical cliques and currents. Instead he looked for inspiration in Auvergne in central France where he was born, starting to collect the songs of the farmers and shepherds that lived in the mountainous region. But he did so as a composer rather than a musicologist, and between 1923 and 1954 he published a total of thirty Chants d’Auvergne, arranged, harmonized and sumptuously orchestrated.

Named after the rough and ready bars where labourers gathered to drink and dance, barrelhouse was a raucous form of piano blues that got the juke joints swinging. From early pioneers such as Cow Cow Davenport and Speckled Red to the boogie-woogie legends Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons, this collection charts the rise and incredible influence of this good-time blues.