Early American Blues: Best Sellers

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...

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,...

If you're going to sweat a Big Bill Broonzy collection down to only one disc, this is the one to keep in the collection. It's really his most representative work, highlighting most of the best-known numbers from his extensive repertoire and the highlights (including a hilarious...

This a marvelous little companion piece to Young Big Bill Broonzy (1928-35) on Yazoo. Broonzy's agtime guitar picking is textbook in its scope, and his vocals are as warm as can be. Dubbed from old 78s, the ultra high quality of the music on Do That Guitar Rag (1928-1935) make any...

Yazoo's Bottleneck Guitar (1928-1937) is a great collection of early recordings from slide guitarist Tampa Red. The 14-track collection has a number of classic solo cuts from Tampa -- including "You Gotta Reap What You Sow" and "Seminole Blues" -- plus duets with the...

A magnificent primer on the catalog of this prolific guitar/kazoo ace that spans 1928-1942. Opening with his immortal hokum duet with "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, the bawdy "It's Tight like That," the disc makes clear just how seminal Red's Chicago-cut output was -- here...

This is a particularly fascinating CD, for it has the first 26 selections ever recorded by Big Bill Broonzy as a leader. The beginning of Document's complete reissuance of all of Broonzy's early recordings, the set starts with four duet numbers that Broonzy cut during 1927-28 with...

It is hard enough to find a comprehensive collection of Big Bill Broonzy's music, much less a smaller one that covers most of the bases. This 22-track set, with 18 of his compositions, showcases many of his best-known tunes from an acoustic on-the-porch approach, and there are a few that...

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...

Clarence Williams made his living as a music publisher, pianist, accompanist and organizer of recording ensembles during the 1920s and '30s. His variously sleepy, scruffy or gritty little jazz bands were usually driven by cornet, clarinet, tuba, jug and washboard players. Whoop It Up! is...

Volume four in the Document series of Tampa Red's Complete Recorded Works reissues two dozen sides originally recorded during late 1930 and most of 1931. During this period, he introduced two career classics ("Boogie Woogie Dance,"

The second volume in Document's series of Complete Recorded Works covers barely six months in the career of Tampa Red, though the range of material is quite wide. The slide guitar legend recorded a few guitar solos, led the Hokum Boys through several songs, did two sides of gospel, and...

Big Bill Broonzy was viewed as a beloved country blues player when he died in 1958, a master of raw and authentic-sounding folk-blues. But this public image, although Broonzy worked hard to maintain it in his later years, does him a bit of a disservice. He was much more than a rustic relic,...

As Marshall Wyatt's thorough liner notes explain in the accompanying 32-page booklet, the violin had a more prominent role in early blues than has often been supposed. Violins were far more apt to be played than guitars in the 19th century, and even when the blues began to be recorded in...

At four discs and nearly 100 tracks, this is only part one of Rhythm and Blues Records' ambitious history of R&B, covering the years 1925 to 1942. Diverse and revelatory, it shows how R&B, like most strands of America's music, is woven from several different sources. Each...

Big Bill Broonzy was one of the few country blues musicians of the '20s and '30s to find success when the music evolved into an electric, urbanized form. From his initial sides with Paramount in 1928, he followed the music's development closely. Switching to electric guitar and...

Yazoo Records has long been one of the prime sources for rural lues reissues from the 1920s and '30s. Transferred from old 78s, some so rare only a single copy or two are known to exist, these tracks offer a wonderful glimpse into a fabled lues past. Essentially a kind of greatest-hits...

The 40 tracks compiled on this two-disc set represent the entire span of pianist and singer Leroy Carr's recording career that spanned a brief seven years, from 1928-1935. The material represented here -- all but one of these tracks were recorded for the Vocalion label -- features...