Dirty Blues: Best Sellers

Although he is chiefly known for his risqué, double entendre-laden jump blues numbers, Bull Moose Jackson (Benjamin Jackson) also knew how to croon a allad as well, his tenor sax playing was facile enough to handle swing jazz when he chose to do so, and his frequent, trademark handclaps...

All of the recordings by the good-time lues singer Lil Johnson have been reissued on three Document CDs. Virtually nothing is known about Johnson outside of the recordings that she made. Vol. 1 starts off with five numbers from 1929, in which she is backed by either Montana Taylor or Charles...

Butterbeans & Susie's only LP was recorded at three sessions during the spring of 1960, many years after their heyday as African-American vaudeville's definitive husband-and-wife team. This modern stereophonic recording is actually the best way to appreciate and understand their...

Butterbeans (Jodie Edwards, 1898-1967) and Susie (Sue Hawthorne, 1899-1963) were the archetypal Ma and Pa comedy team in the world of African-American vaudeville during the 1920s. Married on-stage while young teenagers as part of a minstrel show act, they made it legal soon afterwards and began...

The third and last volume in Document's complete recordings of Chicago bluesman Jimmie Gordon covers the years 1939-1946, beginning with the last of the "Vip Vop Band" sides. Tracks one-six were recorded at the third and final session he would ever lead in New York, which took...

22 songs (with three still missing) cut by Carter, solo with guitar or with Lonnie Chatmon on fiddle, over a three-year period. Document has had unusual luck with the quality on this release, as there's relatively little surface noise on much of it. This helps bring out the richness,...

The title to the contrary, "I Have to Paint My Face": Mississippi Blues -- 1960 also includes recordings from California and Lousiana; regardless, these field recordings collected by Arhoolie label founder Chris Strachwitz are invaluable documents of gifted bluesmen who otherwise...

There have been numerous collections that boast the title "Copulation Blues" or "Copulatin' Blues," but none of them holds a torch to this Trikont compilation that features 25 bawdy tales of well, you know, doin' it. If you slap this slab on the stack at a bash,...

This is an outstanding collection from the vaults of King and its subsidiary labels, Federal and Deluxe. These 24 tracks collect jump blues, doo wop, piano boogie, and outright bizarre novelties stretching from the late '40s through the early '60s. There is not a bad track on Mule Milk...

Giants of Country Blues Guitar, Vol. 1 is a curious and fascinating collection of field recordings of Mississippi country blues guitarists done between 1967 and 1991, most of the selections recorded in the musicians' homes, which means there is a good deal of incidental background noise,...

Essential collections of early female blues vocalists are rare, and considering the time frame (1920s and 1930s), the original sessions here are not well recorded or preserved. Of the 24 songs on this set, most sound dingy and distant, but very much worth listening to and playing louder to hear...

Since leaving the Rolling Stones in 1993, Bill Wyman has gone on a one-man crusade to promote the music he obviously loves. Wyman fronts his own lues band, the Rhythm Kings, and has been instrumental in keeping the names of both classic and obscure lues artists in the public eye through...

Bo Carter is the alias for singer/guitarist Bo Chatmon, a member of the famous Chatmon family from Mississippi (which produced 13 musically capable children). Notorious for his double-entendre blues, Carter based his songs around sexual metaphors and the results were, unsurprisingly, widely...

Blue Girls, Vol. 1 (1924-1930) contains a selection of material from the obscure female blues singers Edna Johnson, Sadie James, Helen Beasley, Coletha Simpson, Julia Johnson, and Alura Mack. For specialists and academics, there is some interesting music here, but for anyone else, the exacting...