Browsing through my cd-shelf to dig up desperate buys from my teenage years led me to find my first Bessie Smith-record: 1990’s The Gold Collection, a cheap European double-package offering 40 of her 160 songs – that wasn’t bad before streaming technology. This reminded me that I acquired honkytonk-hero Hank Williams from the same series: His The Gold Collection is amazingly from 2004, 40 songs trying to recreate his highly praised 40 Greatest Hits, the most potent double-disc from his catalogue. Cheap and nice as these European budget releases were around the millenium, let’s be serious: The way to acquire Bessie Smith’s complete recordings is easy, so start with the first CD-effort, 1991’s The Complete Recordings Vol. 1(of 5). And since we’re all about vaudeville blues and its complete listening history right now, I took a look at Ma Rainey’s JSP-box set Mother of the Blues (2007). There’s nothing much to say, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith’s complete recordings just lie around for the taking, go for it. For more info about complete blues discographies, check my list Complete Blues Discographies.
Headed homebound just once more, to my Mississippi Delta home
Even among his largely very good Martin Scorsese presents the Blues series, Warming by the Devil’s Fire is a standout blues compilation. Some hidden classics, some shining obscurities, great sequencing. This puts you right in the Mississippi Delta. The compilation isn’t exclusively about the big guys and girls of blues, although besides some unadventurous standards (from Elmore James, Ma Rainey or Son House), director Charles Burnett (no relation to T-Bone Burnett) picks some not too obvious tracks by Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker etc. – and the stunning, earthy, non-vaudeville Bessie Smith-track „Muddy Water“, one of her most stellar numbers. While these evergreens help to form a historically informed sort of listening canon, for the blues aficionado, the stress is on the less overly exposed tracks: check out Tommy McClennan howling to the deep blue sea, the completely obscure Stephen James Taylor conjuring an ominous, mesmerizing gospel blues, the legendary Charley Patton crashing the party with his cragged guitar and Sister Rosetta Tharpe forcing the whole congregation into crazed dancing right around that devil’s fire with a hollering gospel-blues duet.
In this almost binary choice between standards and obscurities lies the competence of the compilation: It’s like a broad summyary over blues history with occasional swoops into the weird forgotten details. The music goes from swinging New Orleans pieces in the ragtime channel to rural acoustic delta blues to the great female vaudeville blues/jazz vocalists that emerged in the 1920s, features some urban electric blues examples to conclude the development, and also presents some excellent gospel-flavoured blues, mostly from the 1930s to 1940s, yet stretching into the urban 1950s and -60s. The sequencing is chronologically accurate enough to teach you a little implicit lesson of music history, but it never feels stubborn. The diversity is just right for repeated listening while rowing up the Mississippi.
As even the most common blues fan will know most or all of these artists already, it’s nonetheless a great introduction disc for your niece or nephew.
Text Lambrecht 