East Coast Blues

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...

For most listeners, Blind Boy Fuller's Truckin' My Blues Away (on Yazoo) may be a better bet than Columbia/Legacy's East Coast Piedmont Style, since it actually has a higher concentration of strong material, capturing the influential bluesman at his peak. All of the 14 tracks were...

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...

I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More compiles 23 songs Sleepy John Estes recorded between 1929 and 1941, capturing the bluesman at the height of his creative powers. Unlike many Delta bluesmen of his era, Estes worked with a full jug band, which gave his music a greater variety of textures. His...

One of the high points of Helen Humes' career, this Contemporary set (reissued on CD) features superior songs, superb backup, and very suitable and swinging arrangements by Marty Paich. Humes' versions of "If I Could Be With You,"

Pianist Joe Liggins presented a fairly sophisticated brand of swinging jump blues to jitterbuggers during the early '50s, when his irresistible "Pink Champagne" scaled the R&B charts. Twenty-five of his very best 1950-1954 Specialty sides grace this collection, including a...

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...

These 20 tunes pair the great Mr.Witherspoon with the finest jazz, jump, and lues talents around. Jay McShann, Maxwell Davis, Tiny Webb, and Chuck Norris are only a few of the first-rate sessionmen and arrangers who grace the tracks of this essential CD. A special mention must be made of tenor...

This is a best-of CD collection that actually lives up to its name. Virtually all of Louis Jordan's hits, which musically bridged the gap between small-group swing, R&B, and ock & roll, are on this single CD, including "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying." Serious...

Benny Carter had one of the most consistent and lengthiest careers in jazz history. He was one of the world's top alto-saxophonists in 1927, and he still was in 1997 when he was 90. More than just an altoist, Carter was a major arranger, a talented songwriter, an excellent trumpeter and...

After Rhino Records began their series of reissues of classic lues and R&B material from the Atlantic Records vaults, they did a snappy edit, shuffle, and augmentation of Atlantic's fine Big Joe Turner's Greatest Hits, and the result was the equally superb The Very Best of Big Joe...

This essential single-CD combines altoist/arranger Benny Carter's classic Further Definitions with the related Additions to Further Definitions. The former set was a revisit, instrumentation-wise, to the famous 1937 session that Carter and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins made in France...

A veritable greatest-hits album, The Wildest! is the gem of Louis Prima's catalogue. None of his other efforts transcend its raunchy mix of demented gibberish, blaring sax, and explosive swing, which rocked as hard as anything released at the time. Almost all of Prima's signature songs...

Spanning what is largely considered lues vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon's most fertile and important period between 1945 and 1951, Urban Blues Singing Legend is a superb four-disc box set that features most of the iconic post-war lues artist's best cuts. Witherspoon was a versatile...

Slim was quite an eclectic soul during his 1950s tenure with Bobby Robinson's Red Robin and Fire imprints (as this set conclusively shows). New York blues, pop/R&B duets with Little Ann, even blistering rockabilly-tinged outings ("Number 9 Train," and "Wildcat...

The price of this multi-disc import box set is indeed a hefty one, but it contains every track the pioneering saxman waxed for Decca -- the multitude of hits that inexorably influenced the future of R&B and eventually ock & roll. Bear Family's attention to detail in its...

Although Robert "Barbecue Bob" Hicks recorded over 65 extant sides (three are not known to have survived) in a three-year stretch starting in 1927 up to his death in 1931, the 20 collected here make a perfect introduction to the work of this Atlanta-based artist. He may have played a...

Three different overlapping vocal ensembles from the Georgia Sea Islands are featured on this album, one of the many feathers in the headdress of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. The collection is the result of two different recording trips to the Georgia Sea Islands during the '50s and...