Prewar Gospel Blues: Best Sellers

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...

Bull City Red, who played with the Reverend Gary Davis at various times, turns up on vocals for "I Saw the Light," but the rest of 1935-1949 is all Davis' show. Given the quality of what is here; the quality and inventiveness of the playing alone is astonishing, a youthful version...

Booker White (his name was misspelled on the label for "Sic 'Em Dogs On" 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...

You could make a valid case that anything recorded by Charley Patton is seminal to the history of lues. These, however, are the secular pieces (in his final 1934 session he also recorded some religious titles) on which his reputation stands, and upon listening it's easy to understand why....

Long before Christian rockers were using so-called "Devil's music" to promote a religious message, the Rev. Gary Davis demonstrated that acoustic blues and folk didn't have to be about matters of the flesh. Davis, a fascinating cult figure, was as authentic a lues/folk...

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,...

Were Charley Patton alive today, he'd most likely be pleasantly surprised by the durability of his records. Who could've imagined that the musings of a Delta guitarist, recorded for Paramount in the late 1920s and early 1930s, would be treated as relics of art 60 and 70 years later?...

The story of Delta blues starts with Charley Patton's slashing slide style, hoarse and gruff vocals, and unerring ability to personalize even the most mundane lues lyric. Patton's 78s have been collected in several fine packages, including the JSP box called Complete Recordings,...

Gary Davis (1896-1972) was a decided and acknowledged influence on a number of early rockers, including Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones, and this sampler of works from 1935-49 shows ample reasons why. The pieces are almost all eligious blues, but of an extremely earthy and...

The Document collection Complete Recorded Works (1929-1936) includes all 21 sides recorded by Blind Roosevelt Graves as a solo act, before he formed the Mississippi Jook Band in 1936. Many classic performances are featured, including "I Shall Not Be Moved," "Telephone to...

The story of Delta blues starts with Charley Patton. His slashing slide style, hoarse and gruff vocals, and unerring ability to personalize even the most mundane lues lyric provides the template that eventually led to electric Chicago blues and beyond. Patton's 78s have been collected in...