Disc One - From The Delta To The City

Blind Willie Johnson - It's Nobody's Fault But Mine
Blind Willie Johnson b. TX (1902-1947) v, g. Dallas Dec 1927 Columbia 14303
The role of blues singer and preacher seem to be inextricably linked in Afro-American culture. Almost without exception, blues singers have a musical connection with the church, and preachers have an intimate experience of the trials and tribulations that blues singers deal with in their lyrics. It is by no means uncommon to find bluesmen crossing the divide at a certain point in their career to preach the Word of the Lord. Some straddle the fence for a while until their conscience or their wallet speaks loudest. Deliberately blinded at the age of seven by his stepmother after a domestic brawl involving his father and another man, Johnson is one of the better known of the early guitar evangelists. Although he never performed any strict blues numbers, his distinctive slide guitar playing and rough, rasping vocals, full of emotion and passion, were a great influence on many artists such as Muddy Waters. The song maintains a single chord drone throughout with no change in harmony, which is one of the features of the early Delta blues. Johnson used to tune his guitar to an open D tuning using a pocketknife as a slide to echo and imitate his melodic phrases. 

Pearl Dickson - Little Rock Blues
Pearl Dickson, v; Maylon Harney, g ; Richard Harney, g. Memphis Dec 1927 Columbia 14286
Little is known about Pearl Dickson, and this record, backed with Twelve Pound Daddy was her only release. The Harney brothers provide an impressive guitar accompaniment featuring early examples of archetypal R&B riffs. The chunky Chicago-style four-note guitar pattern, which would be brought to perfection in Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago, is played double-stopped on the bass strings, and transposed as the harmony changes. The high repeated triplet riff is one that Elmore James would later make his own. Dickson puts in a strong vocal performance, and her final ‘that’s enough’ leaves us in no doubt as to who was in charge on the day.

Blind Lemon Jefferson - Match Box Blues
Blind Lemon Jefferson b. TX (1897-1930), g, v. Chicago 1927 Okeh 8455
The sound of Texas blues was somewhat lighter, more sophisticated than in neighbouring Mississippi, and featured more relaxed vocals and mainly single-string guitar players. An itinerant musician, Jefferson was blind from birth, and for a time, T-Bone Walker used to lead him from street to street. He worked as a team with Leadbelly, and is generally considered to have been the most influential rural blues musician. His voice ranged from a high piercing to a low moan, and he had the ability to bend notes on the guitar imitating his vocal inflections. Matchbox Blues has an underlying ragtime beat, but the boogie riff during the middle of the song takes it into another direction which Big Bill Broonzy would later take up.

Blind Blake - Diddie Wah Diddie
Arthur Phelps b. FL (1890-1933), g, v. Chicago Aug 1929 Paramount 12888
Phelps travelled as a hobo in his early life often performing at lumber camps and singing for road gangs, but by 1926 he had settled in Chicago. In Afro-American folklore, Diddie Wah Diddie is said to be the mythical land of no work and no worries, but Phelps is using the metaphor here in a more earthy sense, poking fun at his own supposed naivety. This is a relaxed swinging rag, showcasing his rhythmically inventive ragtime blues guitar, and its strict adherence to a twelve bar blues structure suggests that it may have been used as a popular dance piece.

Barbeque Bob - Ease It To Me Blues
Robert Hicks b. GA (1902-31) v, g. Atlanta April 1928 Columbia 14614
On the East Coast, there was an altogether smoother style of guitar playing, using more complex harmonies.  In a life cut short at the age of 29 by an attack of pneumonia, Hicks was a central figure in the development of Atlanta blues. Ease It To Me Blues highlights his highly percussive style, and he is heard using the kind of melodic and rhythmic riffs, which prefigure later styles. The irregular structure is typical of the rural blues, and although there is an approximate twelve bar harmonic scheme, extra bars and beats are added for emphasis whenever Hicks feels the need. His nickname was earned from working in a barbeque grill restaurant, and his powerful, ringing 12-string guitar made him into Columbia’s best-seller in the 1920s.

Jim Jackson - Kansas City Blues
Jim Jackson b. MS (1890-1937) g, v. Chicago Oct 1927 Vocalion 1144
As the blues moved into the urban areas, songs were being written to reflect the new aspirations of city life. Kansas City Blues is a slow rag with a heavy ponderous beat, showing influences from Frank Stokes, and Jackson’s rhythmic on-the-beat strumming provides an early version of the chunky guitar riff which would shape the Chicago sound in the 50s and 60s. Along with many of the older blues singers, Jackson toured with minstrel and medicine shows, and even appeared in the film Hallelujah in 1929.

Jimmie Rodgers - Train Whistle Blues
Jimmie Rodgers b. MS (1897-1933) g, v. with accompaniment Dallas Aug 1929 Victor 22379      
Rodgers was right at the forefront of the cross-fertilisation between the blues and white country music in the 1910s and 20s. The majority of his recordings are blues-based and some of his material shows signs of influence from Blind Lemon Jefferson. His father was a rail yard worker, and he followed in the family tradition, working on the railroad when he had no musical employment. His appearance in the film The Singing Brakeman further identified him with the railways. This close interaction between country and blues would continue throughout the development of R & B with Hank Williams, Wynonie Harris and Ray Charles playing major roles.

Georgia Tom and Tampa Red - It's Tight Like That
Thomas Dorsey b. GA (1899-1993), p, v; Hudson ‘Tampa Red’ Whittaker b. GA (1900-1981), g, v.  Chicago Oct 1928  Vocalion 1216
Dorsey had a strong religious upbringing, his father being a Baptist minister, but he initially made his name playing piano at rent parties and juke joints after moving to Chicago in 1916. After miraculously recovering from a serious illness in 1930, he retired from the blues world to concentrate on sacred music, and whilst not being the first to write gospel music, he was certainly responsible for bringing the genre to a wider audience, becoming gospel’s best known composer with songs such as Take My Hand, Precious Lord and Peace In The Valley. Along with the Carr/Blackwell partnership, this duo was responsible for helping to create an urbane sounding blues more fitting to a city setting. Its Tight Like That became one of the best selling blues records of all time, inspiring literally hundreds of cover versions and imitations.

Disc Two – The Rhythm

Piano Boogie-Woogie Ragtime And Jazz

Cow Cow Davenport - Cow Cow Blues
Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport b. AL (1894-1955), p, v. Chicago Jul 1928 Vocalion 1198
Davenport came from a church background, but he moved into vaudeville in his early years, and was known to have worked with Bessie Smith. His was a uniquely personal style, combining elements of ragtime and barrelhouse, featuring the use of crushed notes (notes played almost simultaneously to simulate the bending of notes in a blues tonality). His style was also notable for the development of the walking bass, where the left hand plays sequenced notes from the scale on every beat of the bar. Like Meade Lux Lewis’ Honky Tonk Train Blues, this is a tune imitating the sound of a train, and his nickname comes from the name of the pointed ‘cow catcher’ grill located at the front of a particular type of locomotive, in other words, "Get out of the Way, Davenport is here!"  Atlantic records boss, Ahmet Ertegun would later adapt elements of the song to form Ray Charles’ first Atlantic release, Mess Around.

Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - How Long How Long Blues
Leroy Carr b TN (1905-1935) v, p; Scrapper Blackwell, g. Indianapolis June 1928 Vocalion 1191
Carr moved to Indianapolis in early life, so his main influences are urban rather than rural. His relaxed and plaintive style fitted the mood of the city and helped to define the character of urban blues. Unfortunately, alcoholism pushed him towards an early grave in 1935, but he lived on in the records of his contemporaries Amos Easton, Bill Gaither and Roosevelt Sykes. Carr’s restrained, almost casual approach made him probably the most important voice in the first twenty years of urban blues recordings, and his influence can be detected in the work of Robert Johnson, Big Maceo, Roy Brown and the West Coast club blues singers, such as Percy Mayfield and Charles Brown.

Cab Calloway & his Cotton Club Orchestra - Minnie The Moocher
Cab Calloway b. LN (1907-94), v; Edwin Swayzee, Lammar Wright, Wendell Culley, Reuben Reeves, tp; De Priest Wheeler, Harry White, tb; William Thornton Blue, Arville Harris, cl, as; Andrew Brown, b-cl, ts, bs; Walter “Foots” Thomas, cl, as, ts, bs; Bennie Payne, Earres Prince, p; Morris White, bjo; Jimmy Smith, tu, bs; Leroy Maxey, d. NYC, Mar 1931 Brunswick 6074
Brought up in a middle-class family in Baltimore, Calloway was destined for the bar until he found his true calling. Although he is regarded primarily as an entertainer, he was a talented jazz musician, playing a major role in the development of scat singing. Minnie The Moocher could be described as a novelty funeral march, but it is also the archetypal Harlem ‘get low-down’ blues. The chunking banjo recalls the brothels of New Orleans, but the call and response choruses are pure church, with the funeral brought to an end by the rattle of bones. Shorn of its cocaine references, the song was covered in the 1940s by Danny Kaye no less.

Harlem Hamfats - Weed Smoker’s Dream
Herb Morand, t; Odell Rand, cl; Horace Malcolm, p; Joe McCoy, v; Charlie McCoy, mand; Harrison, b; Pearlis Williams, d. Chicago Oct 1936 Decca 7234
The Hamfats’ material straddles the urban blues, jazz and popular idioms. The group were neither from Harlem, nor were they hamfats, a term of abuse to denote indifferent musicians. This song does betray a Harlem heritage though, its roots lying firmly in the slow-drag genre mapped out by Cab Calloway. Weed Smoker’s Dream was written by Herb Morand and Joe McCoy, former husband of Memphis Minnie, and, rather surprisingly, this misanthropic song was transformed into Why Don’t You Do Right, a success first for Lil Green and then later for Peggy Lee, and has gone some way into attaining the status of a feminist anthem.

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Disc Three - Up River To Chicago  

Bumble Bee Slim - Policy Dream Blues
Amos ‘Bumble Bee Slim’ Easton b. GA (1905-68), v ; Jimmie Gordon, p ; Charlie McCoy, g. Chicago Apr 1935  Vocalion 03090
Easton was one of the most recorded artists of the 1930s, cutting over 150 songs in just three years. His reflective style of delivery was derived in large part from Leroy Carr, and he helped to lay the groundwork for the electric Chicago blues style of the 1950s. The lyrics refer to the policy racket, which was a kind of vertical roulette wheel, commonly thought to be divinable from dreams. The field holler-type vocals call out and the piano responds with a now familiar riff, later used to great effect in Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man.

Jazz Gillum - Jockey Blues
William ‘Jazz ‘ Gillum b. MS (1904-66),v, har; Big Bill Broonzy, g; unknown, b. Chicago Apr 1936 Bluebird B6409
In Jockey Blues, Gillum introduces a new variation on the eight-bar blues structure with a diminished chord on the fourth measure, which he also used in his more famous work, Key To The Highway, really a re-working of this song. It was this form, based on the traditional ballad Stack-a-Lee, that was to dominate in New Orleans with such songs as Lloyd Price’s Lawdy Miss Clawdy. A British company, for reasons only clear to themselves, wanted to bring Gillum over to London in 1936 to sing songs from popular Broadway musicals. In response to this request, Bluebird stated that although Gillum was not currently under contract, it would nevertheless be impossible because Gillum was black and he couldn’t read music, clearly showing how white companies viewed their black performers.

Big Bill Broonzy - Barrelhouse When It Rains
William Lee Conley b. MS (1893-1958), g, v; Black Bob, p; Bill Settles, b. Chicago Jan 1937 Arc 70764
Along with Leroy Carr, Broonzy played a pivotal role in the transition from country to urban blues. He started off on violin but was taught to play guitar by Papa Charlie Jackson. The use of the 6th note in the scale as the main melody note is a move away from the blues scale, and it would become a feature of songs written in New Orleans during the 1950s. With the addition of a relentless string bass on the quaver beat, this is the sound that gave Arthur Crudup a string of hits throughout the 1940s and became the foundation of the rockabilly sound at Sam Philips’ Sun studios in Memphis.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - This Train
Sister Rosetta Tharpe b. AR (1921-1973), v, g. NYC Jan 1939 Decca 2558
Famously known for playing rocking electric guitar on her later records, Sister Rosetta was a pioneer in bringing popular influences into gospel music. She shocked religious purists with her forays into blues and boogie-woogie, and her career was damaged as a result. In 1951, she performed live at her third marriage, which was held in front of 25,000 paying guests, and the recording was released as an album on Decca. Willie Dixon used the melody of This Train for Little Walter’s My Babe, which became a big hit on Checker in 1955.

Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup - Mean Ol’ Frisco
Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup b MS (1905-74), g, v; Ransom Knowling, b. Chicago April 1942
Crudup was a late starter in the music business, only learning how to play the guitar in his thirties, and he was nearly forty years old when he had his first hit. Lester Melrose was impressed enough to decide to become his manager in 1939, and from 1942 through to the mid 1950s, Crudup had a long string of hits, culminating in Elvis Presley recording three of his songs. Melrose’s phenomenal skill in spotting raw talent and moulding it into a commercially acceptable format was surpassed only by his ability to defraud his gullible protégés and, like many of Melrose’s other discoveries, Crudup died in poverty. Although he was not considered to be a particularly accomplished musician, his sparse guitar style was aped first by John Lee Hooker and later by Elvis Presley. Elvis, simple soul that he was, sounded completely perplexed at having to explain his own sudden rise to fame in a 1956 interview, pointing out that Arthur Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy had been playing exactly the same kind of stuff as he, for many years before.

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Disc Four – Jazzin’ The Blues

Count Basie - One-o-clock Jump
Buck Clayton, Ed Lewis, Bobby Moore, t ; George Hunt, Dan Minor, tb; Earl Warren, as; Lester Young, Herschel Evans ts; Jack Washington, bs; Count Basie, p; Freddy Green, g; Walter Page, b; Jo Jones, d NYC Jul 1937 Decca 1363
In contrast with the stripped-down big band in Boogie-Woogie, this is the Basie band in all its glory. Swing was a new type of jazz, which developed from about 1935 onwards with bigger, more organized bands, who had to develop structured arrangements in order to avoid the chaos of a dozen or more musicians improvising at once. It was a big sound that anchored the strong beat of the rhythm section to a loosely tied wind, brass and vocal section. Importantly for R&B, this set-up led to one soloist taking centre-stage, and was frequently greeted with rowdy, energetic jive dancing from the audience. Swing helped to propel jazz to ever-greater heights of popularity with the white record-buying public, but its practitioners were often accused of softening the music to make it palatable for its more conservative audience.

Andy Kirk & His Clouds Of Joy - Floyd’s Guitar Blues
Andy Kirk b. KY (1898-1992), Harry Lawson, Clarence Trice, Earl Thomson, t; Ted Donnell, Henry Wells, tb; John Harrington, cl, as; Don Byas, as; Earl Miller, as; Dick Wilson, ts; Mary Lou Williams, p; Floyd Smith, g; Booker Collins, b; Ben Thigpen, d. NYC Mar 1939 Decca 2483
Kansas City was the base for Andy Kirk’s big band, the Clouds of Joy. The jive dancers couldn’t keep up their energetic jitterbugging for a band’s whole set, so the swing bands had to include at least one slow number in their act. Guitarist Floyd Smith plays lap steel guitar on this track, and he was a pioneer of the electric instrument, influencing amongst others Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker.  It gave guitarists the freedom to break away from their traditional strumming role in the rhythm section, allowing them to come to prominence with single string melody lines in the big band set up. Smith had a long career stretching into the 1960s, when he had a resurgence in fortune playing funky soul jazz with Hammond organist Hank Marr.

T-Bone Walker - Mean Old World
Aaron Thibeaux ‘T-Bone’ Walker b. TX (1910-75),g, v; Freddie Slack, p; George De Naut, b; Dave Coleman, d. Hollywood July 1942 Capitol 10033
T-Bone’s career spans more than one generation, starting off in medicine shows and string bands. His first recordings were in the country blues vein in 1929, but he skipped the urban blues phenomenon and did not record again until the 1940s. He moved to Oklahoma City and met up with an old boyhood friend, Charlie Christian, and together they developed a style involving playing single string solos on the new electrified guitar. Mean Old World can be regarded as the very start of the Texas-West Coast jazz-blues fusion, which flowered in the aftermath of the Second World War. With his fluid, mellow guitar riffs punctuating a mid-tempo boogie backing from Freddie Slack, this would prove to be a pivotal recording in the development of West Coast jump blues