The friend who gave me this box set as a birthday present, many years ago, wasn't too shy to admit that it wasn't as expensive as it looked (not that it mattered, of course). You see this is one of the first examples making use of the E.U. legislation limiting copyright for the performers to 50 years after the first public airing - or 50 years after the original recording for unreleased performances. Copyright protection was later extended to 70 years, so post-1962 recordings -including those of The Beatles and the age of classic rock giants- are protected. This had the side effect of sending me to the shops to start re-buying my collection on CD form. Before that, I had figured I'd slowly do it over time as my favorite records become available on cheap copyright-free editions year after year. That's how I ended up owning everything twice, setting the wheels in motion for the Great Vinyl Purge - but that's another story which I've already shared with my blog readers. Well, the abundance of all those great early recordings has resulted in some very shoddy reissues, hastily compiled, badly sounding and annotated. This, thankfully, isn't one of them. The Box Set consists of 20 CD's (24+ hours of material) in cardboard cases and a nice 44-page booklet with recording details and artists' biographies - in French, since this is a French release. Each CD has a theme (e.g. Piano Blues, Female Blues Singers, Gospels & Evangelists etc) and compiles between 2 and 26 artists. Some (e.g. Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Memphis Slim) have half the CD (12-13 tracks) dedicated to them, others only 1-2 tracks. I think all major genre pioneers can be found here, as well as some only known to collectors of vintage 78's. As it was released in 2001, it only covers the years up to 1950 - meaning that the most popular artists like B.B.King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf etc. are only represented by their earliest recordings rather than by their most famous ones. Others (Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Bo Diddley etc) just miss the boat for a few years. Sound quality is amazing, given that there are no master tapes, and the source is probably vintage 78 RPM records. As for the quality of the music itself, it can't be faulted. These are historic recordings that formed the basis for most of modern rock. You should see how Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton talk about these old bluesmen and the influence they had on them. Given that it includes around 500 songs, it is impossible to present them track-by-track, so I'll only talk about the oldest song here: "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith is widely considered the first blues record, released in 1920. The song gives the account of a destructive, uncontrollable passion for an unresponsive lover, and ends with some pretty unexpected (for me) words - it's uncanny what kind of lyrics slipped by the censors in "race" records: "I'm gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop (heroin)/Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop/I ain't had nothin' but bad news/Now I've got the crazy blues". Jeez, this black lady sung about shooting heroin and shooting cops one freaking century ago, and had even had a hit with it. Didn't Ice T put out a record called Copkiller in the 90's which was withdrawn for being too offensive? He did, and it's a rare collector's item now. Goes to show how less daring popular music has become with time. Mamie had already made other recordings for the Okeh label, but these were vaudeville and cabaret songs, while this was her first blues. It was a huge success, selling 1 million(!) copies in less than a year and opening a bright new market in "race" music, i.e. records marketed directly to African-American audiences which were up to that time ignored as a buying demographic. It turned out that despite their relative poverty they were thirsty for music and enthusiastic records buyers. Despite a successful career in film and music, Mamie Smith died destitute and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1946. 66 years later, fans began an internet campaign to buy her a gravestone.
She had waited for a gravestone twice as long as as the so-called "Empress of Blues" Bessie Smith - she got hers courtesy of Janis Joplin in 1970. Bessie (no relation to Mamie) reportedly died in an automobile accident in 1937 after being denied treatment in a white-only hospital. Some of her wonderful blues songs make up half of this compilation's CD 4, while there's also a HBO biopic about her life starring Queen Latifah. There's such a wealth of stories on early blues connected to this compilation. What about Robert Johnson, the man who infamously met the Devil at the crossroads, and who sold his soul in return for guitar mastery? His death at the age of 27 is the stuff of endless theories (poisoning by a jealous husband? Syphilis? Congenital heart disease? no-one knows, as a black man found dead on the side of the road did not merit an autopsy at the time). On the "bright" side, Johnson has not one but three gravestones marking his final resting place, in 3 different graveyards. Possibly none of them is correct though, as a recent documentary suggests he was buried in a mass grave, near the road where his body was found. There's another biopic in the works about him which may shed some light.
Nearly every artist here has an amazing life story, and some of them have been into movies: there's one about the famous jail bird Lead Belly who recorded a bunch of often-covered folk songs in prison, and there's of course the movie Cadillac Records recounting the story of Muddy Waters getting "discovered" in a Mississippi plantation, and his moving to Chicago which ended up changing popular music forever. Another story that I like (which hasn't yet had a film adaptation) is of the two Sonny Boy Williamsons: Rice Miller (AKA Sonny Boy Williamson II) built his early career impersonating the original John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson. Both were wandering blues singers and expert harmonica players. John Lee tracked Miller to his Arkansas home in 1942 to ask him to stop, only to get chased away at knifepoint by the impostor who was a huge man with a history of violence. From then on, the real Sonny Boy just made a point of learning where the fake one was playing and avoiding him - which didn't save him from getting stabbed to death in an unrelated incident in Chicago in 1948. That was "death from natural causes" for wandering musicians of the time. Fake Sonny Boy went on to record a number of excellent blues records, get international recognition, and play with young rockers/admirers including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Eric Burdon before dying in 1965 at the grand old age of 52. You won't listen to him here, though. This collection only includes some songs by the original (John Lee) Sonny Boy. My God, there are so many stories it'd take a big old tome to fit them all. And it is, of course, unnecessary to know all of them in order the enjoy the music. Thanks to the E.U copyright legislation there's a real treasure trove of early blues available to purchase for bargain prices. This is as good a place to start as any.
Full tracklisting is too long to publish here, so here's a link to the relevant discogs entry
