Electric Country Blues

Columbia/Legacy's 2000 collection The Best of Taj Mahal is a first-rate overview of Taj Mahal's classic late-'60s/early-'70s work for Columbia. Spanning 17 tracks, including a previously unreleased cut "Sweet Mama Janisse" from 1970, this hits many of the key points...

A beautifully packaged edition of Junior Kimbrough's first album, recorded live in the converted church that replaced Kimbrough's original wooden shack juke joint. The lineup is Kimbrough on vocals and guitar, Garry Burnside on bass, and Kenny Malone on drums (it's a family...

This first installment in the complete chronological recordings of Lightnin' Hopkins opens with 14 sides he cut for the Aladdin label in Los Angeles on November 9, 1946, and August 15, 1947. Unlike most of Hopkins' austere solo recordings, the first four tracks feature pianist Thunder...

Otis Taylor might well be the best and most inspired of contemporary bluesmen. His White African album was a masterpiece -- which makes the task of following it doubly difficult. With Respect the Dead, however, he does a superb job -- the man is still very much on a roll. Kicking off with the...

Gathering the best of his all-too-brief recording career, You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough includes most of his best-known songs, including "Done Got Old," "Meet Me in the City," "You Better Run," and "All Night Long." The collection does a...

You could see this one coming. Watermelon Slim's last album, 2004's sparse and arresting Up Close & Personal, revealed a contemporary bluesman with a scholar's understanding of the genre and a truly skewed, passionate approach to performing it that hinted at even deeper...

The various white lead guitar gods who began to garner so much critical press during the ock explosion of the late '60s owe more than a lot to Elmore James. While working as a radio repairman in the early '50s, James spent hours rewiring speakers and amplifiers so that they would...

In less than 24 months, Taj Mahal (guitars/vocals/banjo/harmonica) had issued the equivalent of four respective long players. The electric Giant Step (1968) was released alongside the acoustic and decidedly rural De Ole Folks at Home (1968). The nine cuts on Giant Step feature support from the...

Recorded in the year 2000 in Bremen and in Hawaii, Hanapepe Dream is ethnomusicologist, guitarist, and composer Taj Mahal's own gumbo of Caribbean, Polynesian, African, and American folk oots styles done up in the glorious dress of "song," for anyone who has ears to hear, feet to...

Sleepy John Estes wasn't the world's greatest guitar player, and his singing probably never won any awards, but he was unique among early country blues players because of his ability to fashion his own songs around the people and everyday events of his hometown of Brownsville, TN, a...

The Essential Taj Mahal pulls together the bluesman's Columbia, Warner, Gramavision Private Music, and Hannibal labels' recordings, making it the first truly cross-licensed compilation of his work. Given the depth and breadth of this set (it covers four decades), the listener gets not...

The list of special guests who appear on Taj Mahal's Maestro is hardly what one would expect from a veteran bluesman. Among the special guests are Ziggy Marley, Los Lobos, Ben Harper, and African pop vocalist Angélique Kidjo -- not exactly a conventional blues lineup. But then, Mahal...

Asie Payton never released a record in his life, despite the best efforts of Fat Possum. The label spent nearly two years in the middle of the '90s trying to convince the Mississippi bluesman that he should record or gig outside of his home of Washington County. Eventually, the coaxed him...

Otis Taylor's unconventional approach to the lues has made him one of the freshest and most innovative musicians to hit the genre in decades. A multi-instrumentalist, his driving, modal arrangements and defiant, politicized subject matter make most other contemporary blues artists seem...

John Lee Hooker worked from a stylistically limited palette, and the gutbucket lues stomp of his signature songs like "Boogie Chillun" and "Boom Boom" remained enduring and influential because of their simple, primal structure. Like an old junkyard dog, Hooker only knew a...

Otis Taylor doesn't suffer fools lightly, and his insistent, hard-driving modal songs, full of defiant reclamations of history and tender vignettes of people struggling to survive in hostile cultural territory, are like nothing else on the contemporary blues scene. Imagine John Lee Hooker...

The lues has always been an enigma. A music that expresses deeply personal emotions, it does so with a well-worn collection of repeated phrases, rhymes, and floating verses that are nothing short of community property. It is also a music of constriction, with a conservative set of stock...

Radio repairman Elmore James spent a good deal of time re-wiring his amplifiers, giving him a raw, distorted, and urgent sound on electric guitar that, coupled with his killer slide style, made him the Godfather of modern electric guitar, and few gunslingers can match his intensity or powerful,...

Thanks to films like #Deliverance and the rise of luegrass since the mid-'50s, the banjo has come to be associated with white Appalachia in most people's minds, but the instrument actually has its origins in West Africa, arriving in the New World via the slave trade, and consequently...

Taj Mahal had mapped out a unique vision of country blues and its ethnographic sources on his first three albums, and his fourth LP, Happy Just to Be Like I Am, continued in a similar vein while broadening his scope at the same time. Anyone who delivers an arrangement of "Oh Susanna"...