Product Review

This is by far the best and most comprehensive introduction to recorded blues ever assembled, drawing styles, record labels, and eras together with the efficiency of a spider’s web. These five discs--tied to the hit-and-miss PBS film series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues--embrace field hollers, early queens Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the music’s first composer W.C. Handy, Delta slide guitarists, string bands, piano barrelhousers, jazz geniuses Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, Texas hotshots, lyric poets Percy Mayfield and Willie Dixon, Chicago powerhouses from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf and howling white boys, soulkittens Etta James and Janis Joplin, juke joint brawlers like Hound Dog Taylor, African torchbearer Ali Farka Toure, modern guitar heroes Stevie Ray Vaughan and Luther Allison, and even recent hit-makers Peggy Scott-Adams and Susan Tedeschi. And that’s just a smidgen of the talents represented across more than 100 cuts. Nonetheless, there are grave omissions in disc five, which focuses on contemporary blues. The raw electric sound of present-day Mississippi, embodied by R.L. Burnside and other artists on the Fat Possum label, has done much to open the ears of college-age audiences and should be included. Also absent are the music’s most important contemporary innovators: Afro-blues fusionist Corey Harris, psychedelic folk bluesman Otis Taylor and rap-blues proselytizer Chris Thomas King. Still, it’s obvious this collection is a work of devotion and intelligence as well as commerce. --Ted Drozdowski