Songster

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...

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 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...

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...

Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In is an excellent sampling of material from Leadbelly's early Library of Congress sessions, including versions of some of the first songs he ever learned, "Green Corn" and

In early July of 1933, Alan and John Lomax visited Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana with the intention of recording the music of the inmates who lived there. That day, Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, cut his first recorded version of what became known as "Goodnight Irene" and 11 other...

Included are '40s Folkways recordings with Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry. ~ Mark A. Humphrey, All Music Guide

Vol. 2 in a three-volume series of the recordings Leadbelly made for Folkways founder Moses Asch is as indispensable as the first. The 28 songs have been beautifully remastered, and the liner notes -- including a 1946 tribute by Woody Guthrie -- are extensive and revealing. This second CD...

A dozen of these 28 songs were first issued on the 1960 Folkways album Negro Folk Songs for Young People. But this is not so much a CD expansion of that album as a lengthy compilation of children-friendly performances from the 1940s that uses Negro Folk Songs for Young People as its core. The...

John A. Lomax was on one of his field trips for the Library of Congress Folk Music Archives when he encountered Blind Willie McTell on the streets of Atlanta in 1940. He took the itinerant musician back to his hotel room and recorded the material that is found on this disc. From the opening...

The third of three Document CDs that cover Josh White's early years has 16 selections from 1935-1936 and eight from 1940. In between those periods, White suffered a serious injury to a hand that forced him out of music temporarily. The earlier numbers feature him either as "The Singing...

Along with the New York sessions encompassed on Leadbelly's Last Sessions and the surviving tape of the final show he ever played (in Texas in 1949), the tape of this performance -- made at a private party in Minneapolis November 21, 1948 -- constitutes a big chunk of Leadbelly's...

Although he has often been labeled a lues artist, Leadbelly had a much wider palette than that, and routinely sang spirituals, work songs, folk ballads, and children's pieces, and he had an amazing affinity for material that would later find its way into the pop world. Songs like...

Blind Willie McTell is unique among country bluesmen in having a 30-year recording career while remaining essentially an itinerant musician, and during his lifetime he was a familiar sight on the streets of Atlanta and other Southern cities as he performed his varied repertoire of lues, rags,...

All things considered, it's somewhat surprising that Josh White, Jr. hadn't recorded a full-fledged tribute album for his father earlier, but however long overdue the collection is, it more than makes up for the delay with the quality of the collection. Creating a truly fitting...

Recorded in informal sessions with lues archivist George Mitchell in 1967 (except for two songs recorded in similar circumstances in 1962), Good Morning Judge captures the aging Furry Lewis in fine and relaxed form, casually spinning out some of the most hypnotic acoustic blues ever captured by...