As much as we enjoy listening to the new blues music being released, occasionally we just have to go back and remind ourselves of some of the classic blues that helped to get the genre to where it is today. The 2003 CD collection Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has long been a terrific way to do that, but now, for the first time, the 26-track collection has been reissued on vinyl, and it of course has never sounded better.
Admittedly, some of the songs on this collection–which has been one of the label’s best-selling titles–aren’t exactly the most relatable these days, talking about such things as a “Nickel’s Worth of Liver”, “boll weevil here, boll weevil there, boll weevil everywhere”, or “ridin’ along on my old mule” (or even in a slightly more modern Mercury ’49). But that doesn’t make these songs–some of which, after all, were recorded now more than 80 years ago–any less entertaining, with the humorous, folksy “Mule-Ridin’ Blues” referenced above from Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, being a good example of the part-spoken, part-sung style of song, something we also hear on numbers from Vera Hall (“Black Woman”)–whose voice some may recognize as having been sampled by Moby on his 1999 hit “Natural Blues”–and Lightnin’ Hopkins (“Come Go Home with Me”, recorded in 1959 in Hopkins’ Houston home). Although the songs here span a full half-century in their recording dates, the most recent of the numbers (the expressive guitar instrumental “One Dime Blues” from Etta Baker) was still recorded more than a third of a century ago, during a 1992 performance at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia.
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