VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Alan Lomax Blues Songbook (Rounder)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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While Rounder has released a wide range of the music collected by the late folklorist Alan Lomax, this collection, including a number of previously unreleased selections from the Lomax archives, stands as one of the best offerings. The blues were always a primary point of interest for Lomax, since his earliest field recording trips into the American south as an assistant to his father, John Lomax. It was an interest he maintained for decades, with selections here representing his work from the 1930s to the 1970s.

It's important to note that while some of the artists represented here achieved considerable commercial success in blues terms, commercial recording was at best a secondary consideration for Lomax, whose focus was on preservation. Many of these tracks were recorded in primitive circumstances and on primitive equipment, but each of them represents an artist, a style or a song that might otherwise have been lost forever.

There are Delta blues, Chicago blues, Kansas City blues, and Creole blues, work songs, play songs, prison songs and love songs, black blues and white blues and some blues beyond category on this two disc, forty-one track collection. There's only one thing that they all have in common - they're indispensable blues.

Track Lists:

Disc One: Mississippi Fred McDowell, Fanny Davis, Miles Pratcher/Goin' Down The River * Rosalie Hill/Rolled And Tumbled * Jack Owens & Bud Spires/Cherry Ball Blues * Howlin' Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Shaw/Dust My Broom * Boy Blue, Joe Lee, Darnel Walker/Boogie Children * Lucious Curtis & Willie Ford/Stagolee * Cecil Augusta/Stop All The Blues * David 'Honeyboy' Edwards/Worried Life Blues * Son House/The Pony Blues * Walter 'Tangle Eye' Jackson/Tangle Eye Blues * Vera Ward Hall & Dock Reed/Trouble So Hard * Sonny Terry/Worried Blues * Bessie Jones/Beggin' The Blues * Gabriel Brown/John Henry * Dock Boggs/Country Blues * Skip James/Cherry Ball Blues * Jelly Roll Morton/I Hate A Man Like You * Pete Johnson/Roll 'Em * The Memphis Jug Band/Kokomo * Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy/Life Is Like That

Disc Two: Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy/I Could Hear My Name A Ringin' * Joe Lee, Boy Blue, Darnel Walker/Dimples In Your Jaws * Jack Owens & Bud Spires/Catfish Blues * Blind Willie McTell/Kill-It-Kid Rag * Elinor Boyer/You're Gonna Need My Help * David 'Honeyboy' Edwards/The Army Blues * Canray Fontenot & Boi Sec Ardoin/Blues de la Prison * Vera Ward Hall/I Been Drinkin' * Ozella Jones/I Been A Bad, Bad Girl * Muddy Waters/I Be's Troubled * R.L. Burnside/Boogie Instrumental * Leadbelly/ Blind Lemon Blues * Albert Ammons/Sweet Patootie Blues * Sam Chatmon/The Last Time * Smith Casey/Shorty George * Hattie Ellis & Cowboy Jack Ramsey/Desert Blues * Ed Young & Hobart Smith/Joe Turner * Miles & Bob Pratcher/Joe Turner * Big Bill Broonzy/Joe Turner * Hobart Smith/See That My Grave Is Kept Clean * Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee/How Long Blues

[Pick this up at music.webwab.com.]

© 2003 - Shaun Dale