Modern Delta Blues

Too Bad Jim is cut from the same cloth as its predecessor, Bad Luck City. It features R.L. Burnside fronting a small juke joint combo, tearing through some greasy lues. However, Too Bad Jim is the better album, simply from a performance standpoint. Burnside sounds more relaxed and the band...

Corey Harris is adept at combining contemporary sensibilities with raditional country blues forms in a manner so natural that the cracks and fissures between now and then never seem to show, an accomplishment he expands on Mississippi to Mali to include two continents. Again, the music flows so...

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...

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...

Although he had been playing for years, it wasn't until the 1990s that R.L. Burnside's raw electrified Delta blues were heard by a wide audience. His new fans celebrated his wild, unbridled energy, so it made sense for him to team with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the warped indie...

When R.L. Burnside and the rest of the Fat Possum confederation emerged from the northern Mississippi hills in the early '90s, they gave contemporary blues a much-needed shot in the ass, reminding everyone that the genre really wasn't so much about pyrotechnic guitar histrionics as it...

Corey Harris has spent his career digging for roots, looking for the links that bind his beloved lues with African music and other tributaries of black music, including old-time jazz and R&B. On the brilliant 2003 Mississippi to Mali, Harris took his recording equipment to the field in...

Any fan of Delta blues should grab this reissue as fast they can get to it. These are vintage recordings, mostly from 1967, made by scholar-producer Pete Welding when Edwards was 51 years old. Edwards' itinerant lifestyle resulted in his missing many opportunities to record, so that this...

What goes around comes around in the lues world. Although T-Model Ford is from Mississippi, not all of his influences are Mississippi Delta influences -- his dusky, moody electric blues also owe something to Chicago (Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf), Detroit (John Lee Hooker), and Texas...

Cassandra Wilson's swinging for her own creative fences this time. The sultry, gentle, acoustic guitars on her last five recordings have been largely jettisoned for a more keyboard-and percussion -friendly approach -- which includes lots of programming and loops. To that end, she's...

John Lee Hooker's recordings for Virgin/Point Blank may have varied in quality, but never in formula. Once The Healer earned reams of praise and, more importantly, solid sales upon its 1989 release, it was pretty much set in stone that every future Hooker album would be painstakingly...

With new John Lee Hooker songs, new versions of old Hooker songs, four duets with and a new song by Van Morrison, Don't Look Back continues the venerable bluesman's string of excellent albums in his '90s renaissance. Produced by Morrison, it also celebrates the 25th anniversary of...

Blues drummer Sam Carr is the son of the legendary Robert Nighthawk, and from his Mississippi birthplace arrived in St. Louis, and then for good in Helena, AK, where he formed this group, the Delta Jukes. They play authentic, raw, and untamed down-home blues, replete with the rough-hewn, basic...

Recorded by folklorist David Evans in 1979 and 1980, these are Burnside's first recordings with electric guitar and also his first with a band. That band was the Sound Machine, a band he literally created himself out of members of his own family, blending raw Mississippi blues with soul,...

R.L. Burnside is notorious for his gritty, greasy Delta blues, as each of his records since his 1991 discovery have been blistering electric recordings. That's what makes Acoustic Stories so refreshing. Recorded at New York City in 1988 with harp player John Neremberg, the album balances...

It's a pleasure to hear R.L. Burnside's early acoustic blues played the way he learned them in the hill country of Northern Mississippi. Three of these tracks date from 1967 and were recorded in Coldwater, MS by folklorist George Mitchell, while the remaining 16 were recorded in the...

Like jazz, the lues has its share of late bloomers -- artists who didn't start recording or didn't become well-known until they were well into their 50s or 60s. R.L. Burnside is very much a late bloomer; the Mississippi bluesman was born in 1926, but it wasn't until the 1990s...

This is a companion disc to Honeyboy Edwards' autobiography of the same name. It features full-length performances along with interview segments that tell some of the great stories of the blues, particularly trenchant being Edwards' version of the night of Robert Johnson's death....