This, the twelfth (and concluding) 6-CD set of Matchbox reissues, documents not the original US blues recordings of the 1920s and 1930s but the British music scene which they inspired. Ian Anderson (later editor of Folk Roots, but in the late 1960s a sparkplug firing up the country blues scene in Bristol and beyond with his own performances and indefatigable promotional activities) introduces the set with a characteristically enthusiastic and highly informative essay. “Suddenly in 1968 the blues and folk worlds found that they had produced a number of artists singing the country blues of the 1920s and ’30s perfectly in the idiom, but with a quality and personal involvement which lifted them far above the level of mere copyists,” is how he remembers this heady time, and (the best of) the passionate, committed music caught on these six CDs of British blues and associated music goes some way towards vindicating his claim.

     The first two CDs stand head and shoulders above the last four. They are taken from two Matchbox albums, Blues Like Showers of Rain, recorded in Frenchay on the outskirts of Bristol in 1968. Singer/guitarist Jo-Ann Kelly is pictured on the album sleeve, but it is her brother, Dave Kelly, who kicks the first volume’s proceedings off with a spirited visit to Eli Green’s “A Few Short Lines”, setting his wailing vocals against driving bottleneck guitar. Jo-Ann Kelly interprets her chief inspiration Memphis Minnie’s “Nothin’ in Ramblin’” with great panache and does an unaccompanied version of “Black Mary”. Simon [Prager] & Steve [Rye] power through Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Dealing with the Devil”, the Reverend Gary Davis’s “Say No to the Devil”, and Steve alone provides a plaintive version of “Bread of Heaven”. Doyen of bottleneck guitar Mike Cooper plays a rag and an affecting version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” and Anderson himself contributes a couple of classics. The CDs also contain vigorous group music from The Panama Limited Jug Band (Gus Cannon’s “Going to Germany” and set-closing stormers, “Cocaine Habit” and “Wildcat Squall”) and The Missouri Compromise, whose singer Pete Hassel gives his considerable all on both Tommy Johnson’s “Dark Road Blues” and – an immortal classic – Robert Johnson’s “Possession Over Judgment Day”. Frances McGillivray sets her strident vocal version of “It Hurts Me Too” to the faultless bottleneck guitar of Mike Cooper, and the second volume also showcases the skilful picking of John James, his impeccable ragtime guitar liberally embellished with showers of harmonics. The albums were considerable successes on their release and it is easy to see why: what these committed practitioners inevitably lack (the grit that derives, in the originals, from genuine oppression and suffering), they make up for with love and respect for their source material and the unfussy virtuosity with which they interpret it. 

     The third CD features Cooper and Anderson picking their way through a selection of familiar country blues numbers (anomalously attributed on the original album not to individual blues composers but “trad.”). Cooper’s guitar playing, as ever, is simply faultless throughout, Anderson’s a great deal better than adequate, but their singing (especially when compared with the heart-rending, chilling vocals of Robert Johnson, the sly conversational informality of Blind Willie McTell or the affectingly plaintive emotional power of Sleepy John Estes, to take just three examples) does tend to let them down a little, and a novelty selection, “Beedle Um Bum” probably worked better in live performance than in a recording studio.

     Dave Peabody is heavily featured on the last three CDs, and he also contributes extensive liner notes in which he painstakingly charts his journey from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and jug band music. This last form is strongly represented on CD 4,  much of which sets Peabody’s somewhat nasal, reedy vocals against a variety of textures created by, among others, the multi-talented Dave Griffiths (violin/mandolin), the harmonica of Steve Rye and the rollicking piano of Bob Hall. Tenor saxophonist Don Weller also appears on a couple of tracks. Peabody’s material is taken mainly from the likes of Tampa Red, Robert Johnson and Maceo Merryweather, but he does perform a few original blues compositions which, while lacking bite and intensity (“Scared at Night” is hardly “Hellhound on My Trail”, for instance, and “My Friend was Arrested” pales by comparison with a line such as “They got me jailed for forgin’, can’t even write my name”), do effectively showcase his neat guitar style and his considerable arranging skills. Peabody’s material is interspersed with a couple more Ian Andersontracks, guitar maestro Wizz Jones performs “Spoonful”, Al Jones contributes a couple of polite John Renbourn-style blues songs, and Strange Fruit (harmonica player Keith Warmington and singer Pete Keely) perform “Shake That Thing”.

     CD 5 is devoted to hokum, and begins with the injunction “let’s have some fun”. Peabody contributes all of the tracks except “Dan Scaggs” (Al Jones), and for him “fun” consists, in the main, of salaciousness (Will Shade’s “Everybody’s Talking About Sadie Green”), outright misogyny (his original, “Shut Your Mouth”), or back-handed compliments (“She’s Alright with Me”, another original in a genre unforgettably satirised by Tom Lehrer’s “She’s My Girl”). The instrumental skill on show is considerable, but the songs will appeal only to devoted hokum aficionados.

     CD 6 is again mostly Peabody (highlights: neat rags with great mandolin playing from Dave Griffiths), but is notable chiefly for containing four cuts by the eccentric but adept ragtime pianist Quentin Williams, whose intriguing originals are as quirky as his suggestion that they are played with “plyers and a molewrench”. The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra are also featured; they were apparently “national favourites” courtesy of their “humorous live act”, but their songs here are comparatively lame and their singer’s laid-back vocal style fatally lacks zip. Fleshed out with another Dave Evans instrumental, the delightful “Insanity Blues”, plus a pleasantly lazy vocal contribution from Chris Thompson, the CD is thus something of a curate’s egg, providing a disappointingly anti-climactic ending to an extraordinary reissue series. The British Blues Revival is justly celebrated for its respectful and spirited championing of a cruelly neglected artform (and for its spawning of rock behemoths such as the Rolling Stones and Cream), but on the evidence provided by these CDs, its major achievement was in sending a whole generation of listeners back to the originals of Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Sonny Boy Williamson et al.  

The post Matchbox Bluesmaster Series: Set 12 (of 12) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Disc 2: Kokomo Arnold

Disc 3: Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 1

Disc 4: Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 2

Disc 5: Little Brother Montgomery: (1930–1969)

Disc 6: Black Diamond Express to Hell

Blues piano, as David Harrison (note-writer to Disc 1), points out, is an under-represented and under-researched area of the music. He attributes this neglect to the perceived “inauthenticity” of the instrument in what was seen as a predominantly rural, country artform by its champions in the Blues Revival. The examples of the form included on most of the discs in this collection (Kokomo Arnold’s tracks feature him on guitar) demonstrate just how short-sighted this view was.

Disc 1, Blues Piano, features a representative selection of pianists, beginning with one of the most justly celebrated: Cripple Clarence Lofton, whose two tracks (recorded in 1939 and 1943) showcase the Tennessee bluesman’s jaunty, spirited playing complementing his pleasantly laid-back vocals. Blind Roosevelt Graves then contributes two vocals, backed by his own guitar and the piano of Will Ezell. “Crazy ’Bout My Baby” and ‘Bustin’ the Jug” are both jook-band-type numbers featuring Graves and his half-brother Uaroy Graves; two later cuts, “Skippy Whippy” and “Dangerous Woman”, are by a similar outfit, named the Mississippi Jook Band, with which Cooney Vaughan performs on piano. The former tracks are relatively relaxed affairs with a semi-competent (unknown) cornet player; the latter, though tighter, are similarly informal. Shorty Bob Parker is a somewhat mysterious figure, his reedy vocals on “Rain and Snow” and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “So Cold in China” ably supported by the guitar of Kid Prince Moore. Little Brother Montgomery needs no introduction; he contributes a single characteristically robust piano solo track, “Farish St. Jive”. Springback James, on the other hand, is “almost a biographical blank”, according to Harrison, as is Lee Brown, who is accompanied by the better-known pianist Sam Price, a widely recorded contemporary artist. The St. Louis-based brothers Aaron and Lindberg Sparks conclude the selection, which more than vindicates Harrison’s assertion that these recordings are “neglected classics”.

If ever this last description applied to the oeuvre of anyone in early blues, it surely applies to the work of the performer on Disc 2, Kokomo Arnold. His fourteen tracks here showcase all his considerable strengths: a blisteringly urgent vocal style, powerful (left-handed) bottleneck guitar playing, lyrical inventiveness. He started his career (in 1930) with a bang, his two greatest sides “Paddlin’ Blues” and “Rainy Night Blues”, but it was in 1934 that he launched his career proper with “Milk Cow Blues” and “Old Original Kokomo Blues”, the Scrapper Blackwell song that gave him his name. The cuts on this disc were recorded between 1935 and 1938 in Chicago and New York, and they demonstrate just why he was such a powerful influence on contemporary blues singers, most notably Robert Johnson. Arnold is arguably at his best heard solo, but he is also highly effective on the tracks featuring piano accompaniment (mostly from Peetie Wheatstraw). His lyrics, like those of many of his contemporaries, are often violently misogynistic (“Says I feel just like mama, throwing my slop jar in your face (x2)/Said you done lost your mind, and let that old out‑minder take my place. Now I could cut your throat mama, and drink your blood like wine (x2)/Because you’s a dirty old buzzard, and you sure done lost your mind”), but they can also be surprisingly poetic and reflective. He refused to record after 1941, and died (in Chicago) in 1968, still cruelly under-appreciated.

Another highly influential bluesman, Peetie Wheatstraw was extensively recorded in in the 1930s, and Discs 3 and 4 comprise 32 tracks made before his premature death (in a car crash) in 1941. He plays rather basic, percussive piano on all these cuts, accompanied (on Disc 3) by guitarists such as Charley Jordan, Will Weldon and Charlie McCoy and (on Disc 4) by Kokomo Arnold and Lonnie Johnson, his voice a somewhat slurred drawl, his lyrics the customary mixture of what liner-note writer Jack Parsons calls “bragging off-handedness” and “attempts to catalogue some of the types of no-good women the singer has known”. Although Wheatstraw stands out from many of his more introspective contemporaries by prioritising informality and sheer entertainment over soul-searching (his “Throw Me in the Alley” here, backed by a lively band of trombone, clarinet and violin, is a highlight of Disc 3), Tony Russell perhaps hits the nail on the head when, referring to the lack of variety in Wheatstraw’s repertoire, he comments: “Anybody listening to long stretches of his recordings is likely to go stir-crazy”; the two discs here are therefore probably best listened to separately.

Disc 5 documents the varied talents of a man liner-note writer Derrick Stewart Baxter refers to as a “barrelhouse pianist, blues singer and entertainer extraordinary”: Little Brother Montgomery. During a long career, he played everything from straightforward blues to jazz, opera and even torch songs and popular fare such as “A Long Way to Tipperary”. His voice is an affecting plaintive warble, but it is his virtuosic but always propulsively swinging piano that immediately captures and holds the attention. The 16 cuts on this disc come from a 40-year span in his career (1930–69) and include his first recordings (the somewhat tricksy “Vicksburg Blues” and “No Special Rider”), the ragtime-tinged “Mule Face Rag” and – with a “jazz blues band” –  the richly atmospheric “In the Evening” and “Michigan Water Blues”, and are rounded off by three trio recordings (with drummer Red Saunders and bassist Truck Parham) from 1969. A legend on top form.

Concluding with 26 Gospel tracks, divided equally between those recorded pre- and post-war, and ranging from the downright sentimental (“Mother’s Prayer” by A. C. Forehand) to the fiercely evangelistic (“Arise and Shine” by Lonnie McIntorsh) or joyously celebratory (“I’ll Fly Away” by Rev. B. C. Cambell and his lively congregation), this six-CD set (the eleventh in Matchbox’s excellent reissue series) provides yet more evidence of the inestimable value, both cultural and social, of the blues and related music.

The series is to be completed in September 2023 with a twelfth volume, documenting the British Blues Boom.

The post Matchbox Bluesmaster Series: Set 11 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The first two CDs are devoted to Fuller, Disc 1 comprising his own work, the second (mainly) that of musicians influenced by him. Born in South Carolina in 1903 (he died in his late thirties after a kidney operation), Fuller is a true blues great, his singing affecting, sure and confident, his diction clear, his guitar playing assured, often downright virtuosic, his careful picking tellingly interspersed with double-time passages and skilful rhythmic variations. The material on the first disc, recorded between 1937 and 1939, is a mixture of wonderfully atmospheric blues (“Corinne”, “Mean and No Good Woman”) rags/dance tunes and humorous songs with suggestive lyrics (“What’s That Smells Like Fish”), but whatever style of music he plays, Fuller delivers the goods in spades, his light but surprisingly strong voice beautifully complemented by his dexterous guitar. Disc 2 demonstrates just how influential he was in his shortish career: Blind Gary Davis contributes a couple of secular songs, the pungent-voiced Bull City Red (George Washington) another two, and Blind Boy Fuller No. 2 (Brownie McGhee) sings a pair of songs that, as Harrison suggests, “re-create the rhythmic sound of Fuller’s raggy trio sides”. Also containing cuts by Dan Pickett, Sleepy Joe, Buddy Moss and Curley Weaver (whose version of “Tricks Ain’t Walking No More” provides a fascinating chance to compare it with Moss’s version earlier on the CD), this is a hugely enjoyable album, well recorded, and the two CDs together provide a fitting tribute to a great, if somewhat neglected, bluesman.

Disc 3, Sonny Boy and His Pals, as Harrison points out in his notes, features transitional music, “bridging the gap between the more primitive country style of the twenties and early thirties and the slick, often banal, rhythm and blues which has all but superseded it”. Sonny Boy Williamson is joined, in this lively, listener-friendly collection, by (among others) Big Bill Broonzy (guitar), pianist Walter Davis, mandolin player/vocalist Yank Rachel and Washboard Sam, but whoever’s backing his vocals or singing to his harmonica playing, the album delivers consistently accessible, uncomplicated music, clearly recorded and performed with an infectious, breezy informality which, while it may not have pleased the purists (Harrison himself refers in his notes to “fast dance music with electric guitars turned up so loud that the words didn’t really matter any more”), was undoubtedly extremely influential in 1969, when the Matchbox LP was first issued.

 Disc 4 presents a selection of female artists, recorded between 1929 and the early 1940s. The pleasantly strident voice of Sara Martin, accompanied by violin, banjo and jug, comes from the earliest session here, and the rest of the CD features, among others, Texan moaner Bernice Edwards, who accompanies herself on medium-paced loping piano; Madlyn Davis, skilfully backed by pianist Georgia Tom and guitarist Tampa Red; the sweetly warbling Lulu Jackson (singing a sentimental ballad rather than the blues); the plaintive, lamenting sound of Lucille Bogan backed by pianist Walter Roland; and – from the 1940s – the celebrated singer/guitarist Memphis Minnie, her familiar strong voice ringing out against the excellent guitar of Little Son Joe.

 What liner-note writer Tony Russell refers to as the “pre-history of the blues” is documented on the consistently fascinating Discs 5 and 6. Vaudeville, country music and ragtime all fed into the genre, and the first collection, which is, as Russell suggests, “utterly unlike most other anthologies of blues music”, provides a rich overview of these sources. Sam Jones, known as Stovepipe No. 1 because he played it as a novelty instrument (surprisingly effectively, as evidenced on a couple of cuts here) was also a guitarist/harmonica player of considerable skill with an eclectic repertoire of hymns and vaudeville novelties, and on four tracks he performs an intriguing sample of his material. The driving banjoist Charlie Jackson, a vaudeville entertainer with a penchant for the blues, performs a version of the Ma Rainey classic “Shave ’Em Dry” with great aplomb, plus a lively workout of “Skoodle Um Skoo”, also recorded by Blind Blake (who joins Gus Cannon on three tracks, including the celebrated account of Booker T. Washington’s controversial White House dinner with President Roosevelt, “Can You Blame the Colored Man”). Also featured are a skilful kazoo/ukulele player, Joe Linthecome; the extraordinary vocal dexterity (he yodels and whistles in addition to singing) of Winston Holmes; Walter Jacobs and the Carter Brothers (effectively the Mississippi Sheiks, comprising Lonnie and Bo Chatman, Walter Vincson and – probably – Charlie McCoy), who quaver somewhat uncertainly through “Sheiks Special” and the livelier “Dear Little Girl”; plus – a real bonus for Blind Blake fans – “Champagne Charlie is My Name”, which (almost certainly) features the great man visiting a vaudeville item rare in a bluesman’s repertoire. A wholly enjoyable and – given the relatively unusual nature of its material – valuable compilation.

The last disc continues the historical theme of Disc 5, although Russell provides the caveat that the music is “perhaps a little less ‘early’, even a little less ‘folk’”. The Beale Street Sheiks (Frank Stokes and guitarist Dan Sane) provide a couple of tracks, the rollicking “You Shall” and the slightly more sedate “It’s a Good Thing”, Stokes’s familiar tones set against Sane’s rhythmic accompaniment. Genuine novelties are the two cuts from the Excelsior Quartette, rare examples of blues material sung by a gospel quartet. Other artists include a fair sample of the Paramount stable (called the Hokum Boys: Georgia Tom Dorsey, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson et al.), recorded for promotional purposes in Chicago in 1929; Bumble Bee Slim singing “Slave Man Blues” to clarinet accompaniment; Winston Holmes and Charlie Turner performing a delightful novelty song, “Skinner”; and Tampa Red, providing lively kazoo and vocals. Rounded off by the rousing “Texas Tommy” (Yank Rachel) and the Delta Boys’ “Every Time My Heart Beats”, which, as Russell points out, closely prefigures the skiffle music that was so popular in the late 1950s, this CD (to quote Russell’s perfect summation of both this album in particular and the Bluesmaster reissue series in general) encapsulates “the unquenchable spirit of black music, its rampant joyfulness, its wholehearted refusal to be depressed either by commercial pressures or by social and economic deprivation”.

Bluesmaster Set 10 is released on 3 January 2023.

Disc 1: Blind Boy Fuller On Down (Vol. 1)

Disc 2: Blind Boy Fuller On Down (Vol. 2)

Disc 3: Sonny Boy and His Pals

Disc 4: Those Cakewalking Babies from Home

Disc 5: Skoodle Um Skoo – Early Folk Blues, Vol. 1

Disc 6: Home Town Skiffle – Early Folk Blues, Vol. 2

The post Matchbox Bluesmaster Series: Set 10 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

This is a great shame, because Seamen’s story is an absolutely fascinating one: he played with an astonishing variety of seminally important British jazz figures, from Jack Parnell and Ambrose to Joe Harriott, Ronnie Scott and Alexis Korner, not to mention Tubby Hayes, Don Rendell, Stan Tracey et al. – a veritable who’s who of UK jazz as it came into its own in the post-bop era. Seamen was also a unique, contradictory character: a sharp wit and a supremely talented musician, he was, at the same time, a self-destructive junkie; a devoted son and faithful friend, he was also frustratingly unreliable, often a no-show at important gigs and repeatedly courting disaster by over-indulging in drugs and alcohol, culminating in his tragic but ultimately senseless early death from barbiturate poisoning after a fall from a train. 

Dawn chronicles Seamen’s life, from its beginning in Burton to its premature end in south London, in painstaking detail, patiently mining sources ranging from the British Sound Archive and the pages of contemporary music magazines such as Melody Maker and Crescendo, to published interviews with a great number of fellow musicians, music journalists, friends and lovers. He has also personally interviewed everyone he could contact with anything to say about Seamen: Michael Horovitz, Pete Brown, Ginger Baker, Val Wilmer, Charlie Watts and a host of others, including Jackie Tracey and ex-wife Léonie Craven, all contribute valuable insights into Seamen’s character and his place in UK jazz history.

Anecdotes abound: Art Themen, for instance, relates how he carried out running repairs on a wounded Seamen during one of their tours together; John Jack (always a keen, percipient observer of all things jazz-related) describes the early days of both Dobell’s, the jazz record shop, and Ronnie Scott’s; promoter Ernie Garside provides a wealth of detail about the jazz scene in the north of England in pre-motorway days; but the effectiveness of such stories is compromised by the book’s besetting sins, repetition, redundancy and clumsiness of presentation (misspellings, grammatical errors and solecisms litter the text). It also contains numerous offensive passages (racial slurs, homophobia and sexism unblushingly reported, but all swearing in interviews confusingly replaced by asterisks), undermining its undoubted value as a comprehensive account of one of the country’s most important musical figures. 

The post Peter Dawn – ‘Phil Seamen first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Disc 2: Fort Valley Blues

Disc 3: Out in the Cold Again

Disc 4: Boot That Thing

Disc 5: Two White Horses Standin’ in Line

Disc 6: Jack O’ Diamonds

Containing music originally released in the 1970s as a joint venture between Flyright and Saydisc Records, these six CDs comprise field recordings made between 1934 and 1943 by various collectors for the Library of Congress. The fragility of the resultant pressings – they were made on portable 78rpm lacquer disc-cutting machines – means that their transfer to CD as part of Nimbus Records’ Matchbox series is as timely as it is valuable.

Disc 1 features singers/guitarists Lucious Curtis and Willie Ford (plus one track by George Boldwin), recorded by John A. and Ruby Lomax in 1940 on a visit to Natchez. The town’s Black population (more than a majority at that time) was in deep mourning after a disastrous dancehall fire, but the Lomaxes managed to obtain the help of a parking-lot attendant, who directed them to some “real guitar pickers” in the shape of Curtis and Ford. Their songs are a lively mixture of traditional fare (the affecting “Time is Gittin’ Hard”) and originals (Ford’s excellent “Santa ‘Field’ Blues” and “Sto’ Gallery Blues”; Curtis’s “Lonesome Highway Blues” and “Rubber Ball Blues” – all powerfully emotional performances backed by skilfully blended guitar accompaniment). Lyrics include some memorable lines – “White folks sittin’ in the parlor/Eatin’ that cake and cream”, contrasted with Black families “squabblin’ over turnip greens” – but whatever they’re singing, Curtis and Ford are consistently adept and committed, thoroughly justifying John Lomax’s subsequent comment: “We got some good blues at Natchez”.

Disc 2 contains sixteen tracks recorded by John Work and Willis James, performed by artists featured at the annual Fort Valley State College Folk Festival in Georgia. Although both secular and spiritual music made up said festival, this disc confines itself to the former. The most memorable cuts are those by the only singer to have gone on to a commercial career: Buster Brown. His is a unique approach, his passionate vocals and harmonica decorated with spontaneous whoops and cries. Also utterly distinctive is Gus Gibson, his voice a powerful growl, which blends with his slide guitar to produce a beguiling, slightly eerie sound, all the more poignant for being recorded in the last year of his life. Other artists include Charles Ellis, a rare pianist among all the guitarists; Buster “Buzz” Ezell, who sets a variety of songs on topical subjects to a ringingly propulsive guitar; James Sneed, whose lively vocals and washboard are fetchingly set against the guitars of festival favourites J. F. Duffy and Alvin Sanders; and Allison Mathis, a fierce-voiced singer whose version of “John Henry” is supported by the equally obscure harmonica player Jessie Stroller, whose solo rendition of “When Saints Come to Town” brings this standout selection, annotated by the doyen of living blues writers, Tony Russell, to an appropriately vigorous and unfussily virtuosic end.

In 1935, the celebrated writer Zora Neale Hurston introduced Alan Lomax to a man she considered a fine guitarist, Gabriel Brown, who hailed from her home town, Eatonville, Florida. On the eighteen tracks that constitute Disc 3, Brown plays slide guitar with great dexterity and considerable power, often backed by fellow guitarist Rochelle French. Brown is also an acceptable vocalist, and he delivers the lyrics to such staples as “John Henry” and “Motherless Child” – the blues, not the spiritual, later popularised in an expanded version by Steve Miller – with informal grace. His “Education Blues” (“All my education didn’t mean a thing to me, When I met a good-looking woman, that was the end of me”) is a particular highlight of a compelling set, so it is a shame that the disc’s recording quality (marred by surface noise and abrupt endings) doesn’t do him full justice. Brown later moved to New York, when Hurston featured him in her light opera Polk County, and he made more recordings before drowning in a boating accident in his early sixties.

After this visit to Eatonville, Hurston, Lomax and Elizabeth Barnicle moved on to Belle Glade in the Everglades, meeting a fine jook band there: Booker T. Sapps and Roger Matthews (harmonica players) and – on the evidence of the cuts on this CD – one of the greatest slide guitarists of his time, Willy Flowers. They start with solo harmonica visits to contemporary staples for the instrument, “The Train” and “The Fox and Hounds”, but then move on to blues songs, most memorably “Alabama Blues” and “The Weeping Worry Blues”, both utilising the familiar “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” motif, and taken at breathtaking speed by the driving guitar of Flowers. The vocals, both here and elsewhere on this session, are somewhat reedy, even perfunctory, but the lyrics are clearer than on many comparable recordings; those wishing to explore the further reaches of bawdiness (“The Bud”, featured here and on Disc 3) should consult Bluegrass Messengers. The rest of the session features more staple fare: “Frankie and Albert”, “John Henry” etc. are given thorough workouts by this enjoyably informal but consistently virtuosic trio. Both this and the previous disc are annotated by Bruce Bastin. One caveat: as on Disc 3, the recording quality here is distinctly variable.

The Lomaxes are also responsible for gathering the music on Disc 5, played by inmates of various Texas penitentiaries. As on Discs 3 and 4, poor sound quality and premature endings militate against unalloyed enjoyment of the fare on offer here, but fortunately the best tracks, performed by a genuine though cruelly undersung star, Smith Casey – or possibly Casey Smith; his name is uncertain, are complete and relatively clear of surface noise: “ Shorty George”, “Santa Fe Blues” and “Hesitating Blues” are minor masterpieces, featuring plaintive, sweet moaning vocals against faultlessly picked, propulsive guitar. “Shorty George”, in particular, is highly affecting courtesy of Casey’s long-held notes (which bring the late great Tim Buckley to mind) and persuasively emotional delivery. On the evidence of these tracks, Casey is a superb (lost) talent, who could have been a true blues great had he been extensively (and properly) recorded. Among other tracks are material by Ace Johnson (harmonica features), the wavery-voiced Wallace Chains and guitarist Sylvester Jones, and one song from a female inmate of Goree State Farm, the strong-voiced Hattie Ellis.

The Lomaxes’ shortcomings as recording engineers are again evident on Disc 6, which is disfigured by a number of abruptly truncated takes. The title cut, however, Pete Harris’s “Jack O’ Diamonds”, is complete, and features twice. Harris is the only non-convict on the CD, and his repertoire (not exclusively blues, but also made up of cowboy ballads and popular songs) is representative, as liner note writer Bob Groom points out, of his time. His voice has a keening edge to it, and his slide guitar playing (best represented on “Blind Lemon’s Song”) is particularly effective. Other artists featured include the somewhat frail-voiced Tricky Sam, and Augustus “Track Horse” Haggerty (accompanied by an admirably sure-footed guitarist, Jack Johnson), plus a single track from Little Brother.     

What was said (by John Work) about the the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival (Disc 2) could equally be said of the ongoing Matchbox series: “By bringing such inimitable music as ‘Gus’ Gibson, ‘Buzz’ Ezell, and Samuel Jackson make to the attention of America, and in the same action proving to these musicians that their appreciative audience extends far beyond their church or corner storefront where they previously sang and played, this festival stimulates and preserves something extremely valuable in our American life.”

The post Matchbox Bluesmaster Series: Set 9 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Watts was an extremely private, modest individual passionately loyal to his friends and family: his best friend as a child, jazz bassist Dave Green, was still his best friend at his death; he was married to his wife Shirley for 57 years; his granddaughter Charlotte accompanied him on his last tour with the Stones. He was also an obsessively neat, elegant dresser; a collector of everything from jazz memorabilia and Civil War guns to classic cars and hand-made shoes; and a talented artist who famously drew every hotel room he stayed in and played an undersung part in designing the Stones’ stage presentation.

Not, then, your average rock star – and herein lies the problem with this undoubtedly worthy and carefully researched book: Watts is simply too self-effacing, too quiet – even too decent, perhaps – to make a suitable subject for a rock biography. Interviewee after interviewee – and the book is packed with detailed contributions from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, not to mention the scrupulously accurate memory of Bill Wyman, plus assorted touching anecdotes from family and friends – reminisces about Watts’s thoughtfulness, integrity and modesty. Sexton is scrupulous as a recorder of all this (deserved) praise, but carefully avoids the darker moments of Stones history: the exiling of Brian Jones and his mysterious death; Altamont Speedway and the disastrous reliance on Hells Angels security that led to the death of Meredith Hunter; Watts’s own period as an addict (only briefly mentioned); the various excesses of the touring life so exhaustively documented in other accounts. 

Part of the problem clearly lies in the book’s subtitle – it is “authorised”, thus more like a festschrift than a biography – but it must also be (somewhat reluctantly) admitted that the devil, famously, has all the best tunes: Satan is the most compelling character in Paradise Lost, as Lovelace is in Clarissa. In short, Watts may be one of the nicest and most thoughtful men ever to grace the rock scene, but this doesn’t make him a great biographee. 

The post Paul Sexton – ‘Charlie’s Good Tonight’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Disc 2: Little Brother Montgomery (1972)

Disc 3: The Legacy of Tommy Johnson (1966–69)

Disc 4: Big Road Blues (1966–71)

Disc 5: Blues from the Delta (1968)

Disc 6: Viola Wells: Miss Rhapsody (1972)

Having issued seven 6-CD box sets of recordings of early blues, gospel and hokum (originally issued by Saydisc in the 1980s – link to reviews below), the Matchbox Bluesmaster Series has now begun a fresh project: to make available a further five 6-CD sets of classic blues from the Saydisc subsidiary Matchbox. 

Entitled Big Road Blues (1966–1972: The Tradition Continues), the first set of the series begins with an informally recorded set from the doyen of Memphis blues, Furry Lewis. In 1968, music historian Karl Gert zur Heide visited the veteran bluesman at his home (an occasion audibly less awkward than the similar event memorialised by Joni Mitchell in her song “Furry Sings the Blues”) and recorded him singing over a dozen self-selected songs. Lewis apparently resisted his audience’s calls for “Beale Street Blues”, but otherwise proves a willing, enthusiastic performer, his set containing everything from blues classics (the hugely affecting Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See that My Grave Is Kept Clean” the album’s highlight) through largely instrumental features (“Spanish Flang Dang”) to popular material (“My Blue Heaven” in an enjoyably informal version). Lewis’s voice is a keening, emotional instrument (Samuel Charters memorably calls him one of “only a handful of singers with the creative ability to use the blues as an expression of personal emotion”), and his playing, basically slide guitar with a ‘drone’ provided by the lowest string, is highly individual (although his claims to have invented the bottleneck technique have been disputed). This is a valuable record of a legendary figure.

 Disc 2 features pianist Little Brother (Eurreal) Montgomery, whom liner-note writer Derrick Stewart-Baxter refers to as “the last of the great barrelhouse men”. Versatility is Montgomery’s watchword: he is equally adept at playing, in his words, “songs, ballads, blues, boogie-woogie and rags”, and this selection provides suitably varied fare, ranging from the gently rolling, lyrical opener “Lonesome Mama Blues” through the swinging “No Special Boogie” to “Tremblin’ Blues”, a tribute to his chief inspiration, Cooney Vaughan. He also plays a particularly affecting version of the W. C. Handy classic “St Louis Blues”, and accompanies his wife Jan’s singing on four cuts, their highlight “Dangerous Blues”. Montgomery himself has a strong voice, showcased most interestingly on the Irving Berlin song “Home Again Blues”, a vocal version of an earlier Montgomery recording “Windin’ Ball Blues”. As Stewart-Baxter suggests, however, the album’s standout track is a journey through the pianist’s musical lifem, “History of Little Brother”, which showcases all the considerable talents that made him one of the most influential pianists in the music.

 Tommy Johnson is the featured artist on Disc 3, although not in person: the album’s 16 tracks (all numbers written or regularly played by Johnson) are performed by 12 musicians who count the great Mississippi bluesman as a seminal influence. The field recordings were made between 1966 and 1969 at the behest of blues researcher David Evans for his biography Tommy Johnson (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and they provide a valuable record of the richness and variety of Johnson’s repertoire, honed over his 30-year career as an itinerant musician, roaming the South, marrying four times, taking on casual farm work when the need arose, always drinking heavily. In many ways, Johnson is the archetypal bluesman: restless, extravagantly gifted (his brother put the rumour abroad that Johnson’s skill was a result of a pact with the devil, a legend later more readily associated with his – unrelated – namesake Robert), singing about women (“Maggie Campbell Blues”, included here in two versions by Arzo Youngblood and Boogie Bill Webb,refers to his first wife, other songs to women more generally) and alcohol (“Show Me What You Got for Sale” is a celebration of bootleg whiskey, the famous “Canned Heat Blues” details his addiction to drinking anything containing alcohol, no matter how injurious to his health). The performers featured on this fascinating album range from the aforementioned sure-footed, strident-voiced Boogie Bill Webb and the accomplished, confident Arzo Youngblood, to Houston Stackhouse, featured here on the album’s sole electric guitar track, and Babe Stovall, backed on the justly celebrated “Big Road Blues” by a string-band-type trio. Overall, this is a fitting (and unfussily instructive) tribute to a neglected but uniquely influential figure.

Another set of David Evans’s field recordings provides the (previously unreleased) material for Disc 4. Mott Willis sings and/or plays guitar on eight of the album’s 16 tracks; unassuming versatility and keening sincerity are his hallmarks, and his ‘story’ song, “Bad Night Blues”, is one of the highlights of the disc. Other performers – and none of these bluesmen, based around Drew Mississippi, has ever been commercially recorded – include some featured on the Tommy Johnson disc, Isaac and Arzo Youngblood and (Tommy’s brother) Mager Johnson among them, and others utilise, as Johnson himself did, lyrics and guitar stylings from the common ‘pool’, so the great man’s influence was clearly undiminished in the delta region over ten years after his death. As Evans points out, Drew and environs also produced two famous ‘alumni’: Howlin’ Wolf and Roebuck Staples, so these recordings of utterly authentic ‘community’ blues singers, informally produced as they are, provide a unique picture of a highly influential, rich local tradition.

More evidence of the persistence into the 1960s of the local Mississippi blues tradition is provided by the nine tracks (from four singers) recorded by Bill Ferris in 1968. James “Son” Thomas begins with his signature song, “Cairo Blues”, which is a somewhat chilling account of a woman’s drowning, delivered at a suitably stately pace in an affecting, plaintive voice. Thomas’s other contribution, “Rock Me Mama”, is something of a blues staple, but he effortlessly makes it his own. Lee Kizart plays rolling boogie-woogie-style piano on both his cuts, jaunty but powerful, complementing his entertaining vocal delivery perfectly. Scott Dunbar was 69 at the time of this recording, and his age shows in his slightly reedy voice. What he lacks in power, however, he more than makes up for with sheer brio, and his concluding eight-minute “Jay Bird”, an infectious refrain with spoken interjections, is oddly compelling. Lovey Williams has a gravelly voice well suited to his material: “Rootin’ Ground Hog”, and the more familiar “Train I Ride”. As Ferris points out in his notes, these recordings are all the more valuable for their representing the work of the last exponents of the folk blues style that originated in the area. 

Disc 6 is devoted entirely to “Miss Rhapsody”, Viola Wells, who was 70 at the time of this recording, but still strong-voiced, and clearly enthusiastically embracing the chance to make her first major recording since her retirement (to raise a family) in the late 1940s. She was regarded, in her heyday, as “the greatest blues singer in the country” by Benny Carter (whose “Blues in My Heart” forms part of her secular set here), and she performed with various touring acts before     fetching up in New York in the mid-1940s, where she collaborated with the likes of Art Tatum and Count Basie. Nearly 30 years on, her voice is sure, her diction perfect, but she is undoubtedly more at home with gospel/religious songs (on which she is accompanied by pianist Grace Gregory) than with secular and blues material (on which she is backed by a jazz quartet led by pianist Reuben Jay Cole). She herself tacitly acknowledges this preference in her reaction to the session: “When you’ve got a certain amount of love in your heart, a power comes from somewhere that we have no control over. Yes, my God has been good to me.” 

Matchbox now plan to issue Library of Congress recordings along with CDs of the music of Blind Boy Fuller, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson et al., with a final set devoted to the 1960s British blues boom.

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Disc 2: The Famous Hokum Boys 1930–31

Disc 3: Songsters and Saints Vol. 1a 1925–31

Disc 4: Songsters and Saints Vol. 1b 1925–31 

Disc 5: Songsters and Saints Vol. 2a 1925–31

Disc 6: Songsters and Saints Vol. 2b 1925–31 

This, the seventh (and final) six-CD set in the peerless Matchbox Bluesmaster Series, features blues expert Paul Oliver’s selection of tracks sacred and secular (four CDs) alongside a single-artist album of songs and a CD of humorous ‘hokum’ music. 

Lonnie Johnson is featured on the single-artist CD. Generally thought of as something of a sophisticate among blues singers (he collaborated with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael  and Eddie Lang, had his own radio show, and fronted the pit orchestra at the Stanton Theatre in Philadelphia), he worked for Okeh between 1927 and 1932, producing both solo recordings and the odd duet with Victoria Spivey or Jimmy Foster. His guitar playing throughout these sessions is characteristically neat, forceful and imaginative, his voice strong and sure with admirably clear diction, so material such as ‘Death Valley is Just Half Way to My Home’ (based on the ‘Lonesome Road’ theme) and ‘Don’t Drive Me from Your Door’ (on which he plays steady-rolling piano) is highly affecting. His is a fine body of work, professional as well as consistently entertaining, although (as all too often with the classic blues of this period), a number of his songs are, inexcusably, violently misogynistic (‘I’ll take my fist and knock you down’ is the shocking climax to one song).

Moving swiftly on to less controversial territory: The Fabulous Hokum Boys (Georgia Tom and Big Bill Broonzy plus various collaborators such as Hannah May, Jane Lucas and Kansas City Kitty), produce pure entertainment, rags, struts and dance-worthy novelty items. Oliver points out that the Hokum Boys ‘brought a new lightness and sophistication to the idiom, contrasting with the heavy emotion and seriousness of much Southern blues’, and this selection raises spirits with such lines as ‘my [heart] got so hot, burned a hole in my undershirt’ and ‘when she starts to do her stuff, make a bulldog break his chain’. Light-hearted verses and harmonised choruses enliven such subjects as the efficacy of corn liquor and the difficulties experienced by cheating spouses in concealing evidence of infidelity, and the tracks featuring heavy-handed but largely inoffensive sexual innuendo are handled with great aplomb by sweet-voiced but sparky female foils. Both Broonzy and Georgia Tom are, moreover, skilled and deft instrumentalists, making this a wholly enjoyable CD.

Disc 3 comes in two parts: Dancing and Travelling Shows, and Comment, Parodies and Ballad Heroes. These categories cover everything from close-harmony novelty songs, rural folk music and jug-band music, sung to guitar accompaniment augmented variously by violins, kazoos, jugs, mandolins and the odd piano. Performers range from the versatile entertainer Peg Leg Howell and the celebrated bluesman Charley Patton singing non-blues material rooted in the vaudeville stage tradition or the songster repertoire, to more problematic fare: so-called ‘coon’ songs, originally composed to pander to a white audience’s predilection for ridiculing behaviour seen as characteristic of Southern blacks. Examples here include ‘Under the Chicken Tree’ (Earl McDonald dreams of chicken-eating), and the self-explanatory ‘The Coon Crap Game’ (George ‘Big Boy’ Owens). These sit somewhat uneasily in this selection alongside such straightforwardly ‘protest’ songs as ‘Furniture Man’ (a castigation of the repo-man: ‘If ever there was a devil born without horns, it must have been the Furniture Man’) and laments concerning banes of contemporary Southern life such as recalcitrant mules, violent villains and capital punishment.

‘Songsters and Saints’ continue their contributions on Disc 4: the ‘Saints’ are hellfire preachers urging their (extremely vocal) congregations to repent before it’s too late, but there are occasional songs too, spirituals and reflective fare such as Washington Phillips’ ‘I am Born to Preach the Gospel’. Anyone familiar with Phillips’ uniquely touching dulceola-accompanied masterpiece ‘Denomination Blues’ (which can be heard on the classic compilation Screening the Blues, with notes from Paul Oliver) will not be surprised to hear the selections on this disc that detail all the baptist sub-sects and their varying practices and beliefs, but there are also topical references to Colonel Lindbergh, bo weevils and the sinking of the Titanic, so that a fascinating picture of contemporary Southern life emerges from the CD’s 18 tracks.

Disc 5 contains more contemporary commentary, on everything from a subtly satirised visit to President Roosevelt by Booker T. Washington (Gus Cannon’s ‘Can You Blame the Colored Man’) to an anti-liquor 1909 mayoral campaign (Frank Stokes’s ‘Mr Crump Don’t Like It’). Featured artists on this CD include the conversationally informal Papa Charlie Jackson, the slurry-voiced Sam Jones (whose instruments include a stovepipe) and the widely influential Texas bluesman Henry Thomas (whose USP is his use of quills, a pan-pipe-like instrument made from cane reeds). Highlights are Blind Blake’s deft guitar accompaniments to his two cuts, ‘He’s in the Jailhouse Now’ and ‘West Coast Blues’, which provide a suitably musicianly climax to an entertainingly varied selection.

Although it reaches a rousing climax with the rasping, rousing vocals of Sister Bessie Johnson, Disc 6 contains much contemplative matter in the form of preaching about Nebuchadnezzar (J. C. Burnett, who also uses a deck of cards to illustrate his teaching, much as country singers such as Wink Martindale were to do much later in the century), and (again – it seems to have been something of an obsession with Southern preachers) a Blind Willie Johnson song about the Titanic disaster. Johnson has an attractive, growling vocal style and plays a mean slide guitar, and his duet with wife Angeline on ‘The Rain Don’t Fall on Me’ is particularly affecting. Fleshed out with more preaching and cautionary tales, this, the last disc of Matchbox’s exemplary reissue series, provides a useful complement to the secular blues that constitute the bulk of the material on the previous six sets. 

As Paul Oliver says, in his summary at the end of his characteristically learned notes: ‘We should no longer let our absorption with blues and gospel deflect our attention from the richness and variety of those idioms of an early era; not only because the roots of contemporary music are embedded in them, but also for their intrinsic worth…’ Amen to that. 

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Disc 2: Memphis Jug Band 1927–34

Disc 3: Barbecue Bob 1927–30

Disc 4: Leecan & Cooksey 1926–27

Disc 5: Roosevelt Sykes 1929–34

Disc 6: Mississippi Sheiks 1930–34

The sixth six-CD set in the Matchbox Bluesmaster Series is slightly more slanted towards ‘hokum’ music than previous sets, featuring the work of popular entertainers as well as that of more ‘pure’ blues artists, but like its predecessors it is a veritable goldmine, containing numerous priceless nuggets of early recorded music, all scrupulously annotated by world authority Paul Oliver.

Papa Charlie Jackson is unusual in that his preferred instrument is the banjo rather than the guitar (though three tracks here feature his limber guitar playing), and this gives his music a slightly vaudevillian flavour, appropriate for his work as an entertainer on medicine shows, where he’d play for hoochy-coochy dancers etc., using contemporary events and issues as inspiration for a number of his original songs. His has a pleasingly informal approach, his singing frequently interspersed with spoken interludes; as Oliver comments, he ‘never seemed to succumb to complaints… but told of scuffling and hardship with a wry, sometimes ironic humour’.

The Memphis Jug Band needs no introduction – anyone interested in early American music will doubtless already be familiar with such timeless classics as ‘Stealin’, Stealin’’, ‘Whitewash Station Blues’ and ‘Got a Letter from My Darlin’’ – but this selection features other vocalists as well as Will Shade, Ben Ramey and Will Weldon, among them the sweetly strident Jennie Clayton and Charlie ‘Bozo’ Nickerson. Their material, delivered with all their customary panache (featuring musical saw, kazoo, washboard as well as the jug), is anchored in blues, but also contains dance material and road-show standards, well loved by audiences keen to distract themselves from the vicissitudes associated with the Great Depression.

The CD featuring Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) begins with ‘When the Saints Go Marching in’, a relatively uncommon selection at the time (though it has subsequently become the anthem of the New Orleans Revival), and continues with another religious number, ‘Jesus’ Blood Can Make Me Whole’, but the singer is clearly more at ease with secular titles such as ‘Easy Rider, Don’t You Deny My Name’ or the hokum of ‘It Won’t be Long Now’, a humorous song performed with his older brother Charley, who taught him to play guitar. Barbecue Bob has a warm baritone voice and an eclectic repertoire, so his premature death at 29 from pneumonia robbed the music of a potential great.

Leecan & Cooksey are Bobby Leecan (guitar) and Robert Cooksey (harmonica), and most of the cuts on their CD are duets (apart from a solo ‘Blind Bobbie Baker’ version of the classic ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’), all addressed with considerable brio, if no great subtlety. They also collaborated with cornet player Tom Morris in the Dixie Jassers Washboard Band, who provide the last four items in this lively, intriguing selection.

Roosevelt Sykes is another familiar name, here caught at the beginning of a fifty-year career. Professional to his fingertips, he clearly hit his stride early (he is in his mid-twenties on these sessions), dispensing an easy-rolling piano which perfectly complements both his own engaging singing and that of others included here, such as Isabel Sykes, Charlie McFadden and Carl Rafferty. As Oliver points out, Sykes was ‘unusual among blues singers for he had an outgoing disposition and a… generally optimistic outlook’, and his inclusion in this set brings welcome emotional variety to the proceedings.

The Mississippi Sheiks are a family string band with rural origins featuring Bo Carter (Chatmon) and Walter Vinson among others, and their repertoire is fascinatingly broad-based, including songs about everything from Prohibition to automobiles and the numbers racket. The violin playing of Lonnie Chatmon is, admittedly, not particularly tuneful, but if the band are somewhat lacking in strict musicality they more than make up for it with the spirit and energy of their performances.

This is the penultimate issue in a seven-set series, but Saydisc are to continue their admirable reissuing policy with a further five volumes (each of six CDs) of Matchbox 1970s blues releases (including Library of Congress recordings), field recordings and some unissued material. 

Bluesmaster Vol. 6 is released on 4 February 2022.

The post Matchbox Bluesmaster Series: Set 6  first appeared on UK Jazz News.

2: Frank Stokes 1927–29

3: Blind Blake 1926–29

4: Big Bill Broonzy 1927–32

5: Mississippi Sheiks 1930 (Vol. 1)

6: Lonnie Johnson (Vol. 1) 1926–28

ALSO THE BOOK:

Blues from the Avon Delta: The Matchbox Blues Story by Mark Jones

The fifth six-CD set of early blues recordings from the Saydisc vaults mines the wealth of material (originally issued on LPs between 1982 and 1988) that comes under the category of “remaining titles” or “new to LP”, but – like its predecessors – comes with comprehensive notes by the late great blues professor Paul Oliver.

     Starting, appropriately enough (for he was a great pioneer of rural blues, his recordings bringing the form to the attention of the record-buying public in the late 1920s), with Blind Lemon Jefferson, the set begins with the singer’s first secular titles, “Got the Blues” and “Long Lonesome Blues”, the former featuring the unforgettable opening line: “Well the blues come to Texas, lopin’ like a mule”. The subsequent cuts include the celebrated “Match Box Blues” (part of Ma Rainey’s repertoire) and a series of snapshots of rural life ranging from a fear of being shot (“Cannon Ball Moan”) to a visit from the repo man (“Empty House Blues”), all showcasing Jefferson’s finely honed guitar technique and haunting vocal style.

     Frank Stokes may cast his stylistic net slightly more widely than Jefferson, including syncopated ragtime and dance rhythms and jaunty banter passages in his repertoire, but his guitar playing is similarly light and deft, and his often sensual lyrics, plus his humorous songs, made him a surefire attraction at medicine shows when he was still a teenager. Many of the songs included here feature Stokes accompanied by either guitarist Dan Sane or violinist Will Batts (with whom he often played in a string band popular in country clubs), but perhaps his most celebrated song, “I Got Mine”, is a lively solo performance recorded in Memphis in 1928. 

      Blind Blake has been memorably described (by blues writer Dr Hans R. Rookmaaker) as “a real artist with a personal style, never going beyond his capabilities, trying to refine his technique but always staying within the tradition he was born into”, and eleven of the eighteen tracks featured here are solo recordings that more than justify such praise. Blake, however, was a skilful enough guitarist to attract the attention of jazz musicians, and several tracks featured on this CD see him collaborating with the great clarinettist Johnny Dodds and the xylophone player Jimmy Bertrand, prompting Paul Oliver to speculate rather ruefully on “ways in which blues and jazz combinations could have been developed”. There are also three songs from Bertha Henderson, sympathetically accompanied by Blake as she moans out her mournful lyrics. Blake is a somewhat neglected figure these days, but his technical mastery shines through on these recordings, particularly on his solo-guitar outings “Guitar Chimes” and “Blind Arthur’s Breakdown”, which conclude the selection.

     Big Bill Broonzy, contrastingly, has never been neglected: as Oliver points out, “There are few blues singers as extensively recorded, as widely respected in his day, or as consistently good as Big Bill Broonzy.” His work, indeed, may well be a good place to start for anyone wishing to become better acquainted with early blues, since it is intensely communicative and accessible. His cleanly articulated guitar playing, too, prefigures rock guitar in a way little early blues playing does (Robert Johnson aside, of course). Here, Broonzy is featured in a variety of contexts, accompanied by Georgia Tom Dorsey or the Jug Busters, or accompanying the likes of Bill Williams or Georgia Tom and Jane Lucas in his inimitably light-fingered, thoroughly professional manner.

     The Mississippi Sheiks (the name is a nod to the contemporary popularity of the film heart-throb Rudolph Valentino) were extensively recorded (though not at full string-band strength) performing in a variety of musical modes from blues to novelty songs, and this CD concentrates on just one year’s output from the family-based band formed around the thirteen children of Eliza Jackson and Henderson Chatmon, later joined by Walter Vincson. An intriguing highlight of this selection is a highly affecting version of “Sitting on Top of the World”, but all their material is addressed with infectious verve and brio.

     Lonnie Johnson is already a significant presence on previous CD sets in this consistently excellent series; here, he gets a disc to himself to vindicate Paul Oliver’s fulsome praise of him: “There has been no blues singer to compare with Lonnie Johnson for diversity of experience and breadth of respect … His importance as a blues artist is without question, not only as a singer and guitarist, but also as an influence on his contemporaries … and as an accompanist to singers as varied as Texas Alexander and Clara Smith.” On these eighteen tracks, he is featured as singer, guitarist and violinist, not to mention banjoist, and he effortlessly demonstrates on all of them just why, to quote Oliver again, “there was no name in the male blues [between 1926 and 1928] better known than that of Lonnie Johnson”. Inventive, deft and fluent, he perfectly exemplifies the spirit and energy that make these Bluesmaster compilations so compulsively listenable.

Also available: Blues from the Avon Delta: The Matchbox Blues Story by Mark Jones (The Record Press, 120pp., £19.99), an exhaustive survey of “how Blueswailin’ Bristol kick-started Britain’s late 1960s’ country blues boom and became the epicentre of the UK’s DIY blues record label industry”. A labour of love, this painstakingly researched work, as well as providing a history of the 1960s British blues boom, lists all Saydisc (and related companies’) releases (complete with sleeve images). Blind Boy Fuller and Kokomo Arnold jostle with Jo-Ann and Dave Kelly, Peetie Wheatstraw and Furry Lewis with Mike Cooper and Ian Anderson – the result is truly an aficionado’s dream. 

Bluesmaster Vol. 5 is released on 5 November 2021.

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