Acoustic Memphis Blues

This 20-song single CD reissues Furry Lewis' first modern commercial recordings, done for two Prestige/Bluesville albums (Back on My Feet Again, Done Changed My Mind) in April and May of 1961 at Sun Studios in Memphis. Lewis is in brilliant form throughout, his fingers nearly as fast and...

This release supplants both the Yazoo In His Prime and the Wolf Records 1990 Complete Works collections released earlier. This time everything that Lewis recorded for Victor and Vocalion during those extraordinary two years of work during the 1920's has been gathered together, including...

This 20-song compilation of Frank Stokes' late-'20s recordings for the Victor label is a more expansive version of the Stokes collection available on Yazoo Records, with very little overlap between the two. The sound is variable, as is usually the case with Document's releases,...

Yazoo's Original Rolling Stone is a wonderful disc containing 14 of the 17 sides Robert Wilkins recorded before the war. Wilkins was one of the great country-blues artists, and these songs -- including "I'll Go with Her" -- became legendary, not only because the songs were...

The Memphis Jug Band was quite popular from 1927-1930, particularly if one judges the group by its many recordings (which fill up three CDs in this series). The second volume has slightly better material than the other two CDs, but all are easily recommended. During 1928 and 1929, the Memphis...

The fifth and final volume in Document's series begins with a mid-1940 studio date, Memphis Minnie's first in over a year; recorded with Little Son Joe on second guitar, these simple, unaffected sides are among her strongest, with tracks like "Ma Rainey" (a tribute to the...

One of the greatest of all jug bands and possibly the most influential, the Memphis Jug Band recorded extensively from 1927-1930. All of its recordings (other than three sessions from 1934) have been reissued by the European Document label on three CDs. The original version of the group...

One of the great cultural achievements of the late 20th century was the reissuing of the Memphis Jug Band's complete recorded output on Document in four volumes with an appendix on Wolf records reserved for alternate takes. The fourth installment picks up the trail of this gutsy little...

The first volume in Document's series of Memphis Minnie solo recordings collects the material she cut in Chicago over a period of six sessions between the first weeks of 1935 and Halloween of that same year. Her first sides following her personal and professional breakup with Kansas Joe...

Document's Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1930-1931) reissues 23 sides from Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe, including classics like "Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues," "Frankie Jean (That Trottin' Fool)," and a version of "Bumble Bee." Still, the lengthy...

The liner notes implicitly state that no other jug band surpassed the Memphis Jug Band in breadth and scope. They played all styles -- lues, ags, and pop -- and performed them better than their competitors. Since few listeners or reviewers are experts on jug bands, there is little use in...

The music -- a meld of lues and older, more satiric songster-inspired material, as well as gospel-influenced sides -- speaks for itself on this, the widest-ranging and best-sounding collection of Frank Stokes' work issued on CD. The Best of Frank Stokes, released by Yazoo, combines the...

Born in Algiers, LA, in 1897, Lizzie Douglas forged a reputation as Memphis Minnie during the late '20s and throughout the '30s by singing topical blues tunes in a powerful voice while strumming the guitar, sometimes with piano, mandolin, and additional guitar accompaniment. Although...

Document's Memphis Blues 1928-1935 contains the 14 Robert Wilkins sides that are currently in circulation, augmented with cuts by a pair of country bluesmen, Tom Dickinson and Allen Shaw. Since Wilkins' recordings are also available on Yazoo's Original Rolling Stone, which is...

A fine St. Louis singer and guitarist, this was the first volume of songs Charley Jordan did in the early '30s. He could be very humorous or cuttingly poignant, and there are examples in both veins on this anthology. The sound quality ranges from good to awful. ~ Ron Wynn, All Music Guide

Born in Mississippi, Robert Wilkins moved to Memphis as a teenager, and his vocal and guitar approach on the 17 sides he cut for the Victor, Brunswick, and Vocalion labels between 1928 and 1935 form an almost perfect bridge between the Delta and Memphis country blues styles. Wilkins was a fine...

Three years after William Lee Ellis gained the attention of the world's lues community with his stellar third album and Yellow Dog Records debut, The Full Catastrophe, he arrived on a horse of a different color. Conqueroo is a record steeped deeply in all of the traditions that have...

Memphis Jug Band with Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers is a wonderful four-disc set which amounts to a street corner jug band party in a box, containing nearly every side recorded in the '20s and '30s by America's two best-ever jug bands, Will Shade's Memphis Jug Band and Gus...

Forget the shaky sound and noise on some of the tracks, and the slightly sketchy notes, and the fact that some tracks on this supposedly "complete" collection are missing -- these are Paramount recordings, and we're lucky to have what we do, as good as it does sound. What's...