Acoustic Texas Blues

These recordings, dating between 1927 and 1929, are a unique body of work: work songs, minstrel numbers, rags, and what we now define as the blues, all offered in an unpretentious form that would have been every bit as compelling had Henry Thomas cut them this way 40 years later. Songs such as...

Arhoolie's Texas Sharecropper & Songster is a recording made in 1960, during the blues revival. Prior to the blues revival, Mance Lipscomb was an unknown, and his discovery was one of the positive byproducts of the revival. He was a great country-blues man, and this is perhaps his...

If you've never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and...

Document's Complete Recorded Works (1928-1929) is an exhaustive overview of Bessie Tucker's known recordings, compiled from a pair of late-'20s sessions and including no less than seven alternate takes (each presented right next to the original). This reliance on exact sequencing,...

With his raw Texas blues sound, Sam Lightnin' Hopkins scored a number of R&B chart hits in the '40s and early '50s. In the late '50s and early '60s, he played solo acoustic sets to accommodate the growing folk festival circuit. He took his blues to Carnegie Hall and...

Yazoo's Praise God I'm Satisfied is an excellent collection of 14 tracks Blind Willie Johnson recorded in the '30s, including such numbers as "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed," "Praise God I'm Satisfied," "Rain Don't Fall on Me" and "Jesus...

Blind Willie Johnson was perhaps the finest singing evangelist of all time. While the 16 tracks on this CD aren't as striking as those on the seminal Praise God I'm Satisfied, they're still invigorating and a vital part of his legacy. Johnson played acoustic rather than slide on...

The third volume in Document's Complete Recorded Works series of Blind Lemon Jefferson collections features 21 songs, all recorded during 1928. Though the period included one stone-cold classic ("See That My Grave Is Kept Clean") and a few intriguing ovelties ("Balky Mule...

This is an awe-inspiring four-CD set in a world that has no shortage of brilliant artists represented in their entirety. Listeners wishing to appreciate the spellbinding, primal sound of Blind Lemon Jefferson can start here, except they may never want to finish; 70-some years since his death,...

John T. Smith, known variously as The Howling Wolf, Funny Papa, or (by default) Funny Paper Smith, was an itinerant blues singer who accompanied himself on the guitar while circulating throughout Texas during the 1920s and early '30s. Between September 1930 and April 1935 he made phonograph...

I'm the Boss Card in Your Hand, 1937-1960 stands as the definitive Black Ace collection to date -- not only does Arhoolie's CD reissue include the entirety of their original 1960 release, but it also appends previously unissued material from the same session and even tosses in a...

Solid but thematically unvarying country blues from a fine practitioner.

A Lightnin' solo concert from his college kiddie-folk period (1964), this languished unissued in Fantasy Records' vaults until its release in the early '90s. That's a shame, because this concert captures Lightnin' at his beguiling best, spinning tales and blues magic...

This first installment in the complete chronological recordings of Lightnin' Hopkins opens with 14 sides he cut for the Aladdin label in Los Angeles on November 9, 1946, and August 15, 1947. Unlike most of Hopkins' austere solo recordings, the first four tracks feature pianist Thunder...

Lightnin' Hopkins' ability to express himself as a seemingly perpetual one-man show is dramatically demonstrated on this second installment of his complete works in chronological order. Comfortably ensconced in Houston, TX, during February of 1948, the guitarist cut 22 sides for the...

Lightnin' Hopkins' career, recording history, and music remain fascinating. Like John Lee Hooker, he served as a bridge between older country blues and the newer electric variety; like Hooker, he played in both styles while never losing the idiosyncratic nature of the earlier method...

Prestige Profiles, Vol. 8 contains previously released tracks taken from Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins' short stint with the label. These 16 cuts feature both solo and small-combo sessions recorded between 1960 and 1964, and include tasteful versions of such Lightnin' favorites...

Most JSP box sets are comprehensive chronological core samples taken from the recording careers of great jazz, lues and country musicians. Some may find JSP's Lightning Special, Vol. 2, subtitled "Volume Two of the Collected Works," to be uncharacteristically difficult to...

90 performances by Blind Lemon Jefferson were reissued in chronological sequence as his "complete recorded works" by the Document label in 1994. The songs were parceled out neatly so that material from each successive year of his short recording career occupied a separate disc, with...

Volume two of Document's near-complete recorded works of Blind Lemon Jefferson presents 22 sides waxed for Okeh and Paramount during a seven month period between March and October 1927. On tracks six, nine, and ten he is accompanied by pianist George Perkins, and this adds another dimension...