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ALBERT KING
Live Wire/Blues Power
Fantasy
B.B. King may be more historically influential, but the unrelated Albert brought blues to a rock, some might say hippie, audience with his frequent opening appearances at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and West. The latter was the venue for this 1968 classic that found King barreling through “Night Stomp,” “Please Love Me,” and a definitive eight minute version of “Blues at Sunrise.” You don’t have to listen closely to hear his effect on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton, especially when he’s tearing into the ten minute title track, rousing the audience with his searing guitar leads and amiable vocals.
–Hal Horowitz
MAGIC SAM
West Side Soul
Delmark
West Side Soul is one of the greatest blues guitar albums of all time. I first heard about Magic Sam in 1968 from Philly harmonica ace John Colgan-Davis who said that Sam “sounded like two guitars at once.” Filled with soulfully soaring vocals and visceral solos that skillfully combined tension and explosiveness, Sam’s versions of tunes like “Sweet Home Chicago” and “I Feel So Good (I Wanna Boogie)” became exemplars for all who followed; his frenetic instrumental “Lookin’ Good” is aurally orgasmic. In their movie, the Blues Brothers give a shout out to Sam as they introduce “Sweet Home Chicago.” I saw Sam live at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, PA in August, 1969. It was one of the most memorable performances I’ve ever witnessed. Four months later he was dead at age 32, one of the saddest tragedies in blues history.
–Thomas Cullen III
BOBBY “BLUE” BLAND
Two Steps From the Blues
Duke
Bobby “Blue” Bland has been at the top of the soul blues genre for decades. His signature snorts and grunts have melted women’s hearts throughout the chitlin’ circuit for well over 50 years. Born in 1930, Bland discovered his blue voice on Beale Street during the explosive 1940s when B.B., Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, Roscoe Gordon, Johnny Ace, and Bland shaped this urban blues sound. He just celebrated his 80th birthday; listen to what he sounded like at 30. Bland works with a honeyed voice that kneels and begs for another chance. This album was Bland’s first LP and includes standards like the title track, “I Pity the Fool,” “I’ll Take Care of You,” and “I Don’t Want No Woman” with guitarists Wayne Bennett’s and Clarence Hollimon’s backing. One listen is solid proof that Bobby “Blue” Bland has shaped soul blues into the sound we hear today.
–Art Tipaldi
ROBERT JOHNSON
King of the Delta Blues Singers
Columbia
If a Martian landed next to the Blues Revue booth at a festival and said he dug the tunes, this album is where I would steer him. It is safe to say that this is the most influential blues recording. Period. These songs are so deeply engrained in our blues souls that it is simply unfathomable. This is more than an historical document; this is the blues presented in its truest form. Straight, no chaser. It’s a little rough going down, but it is powerful when it gets there. Like so many of us, I came to this recording from hearing later versions, but there is something about the haunting original versions that simply has never been recreated. This is ground zero. This is the shit. This is the blues. (This was the first album inducted into the
Hall Of Fame.)
– Chip Eagle
T-BONE WALKER
The Complete Recordings of T-Bone Walker 1940-1954 (Mosaic, 1990)
You can’t ride to the moon with Neil Armstrong or watch Albert Einstein scribble that first “E=mc,²” but with this six-CD box you can witness history being made, as T-Bone Walker invents modern electric blues. Like fellow Texan Charlie Christian, Walker instinctively knew what an electric guitar could do. Opening with “T-Bone Blues,” from his 1940 Les Hite session, through “Call It Stormy Monday,” “T-Bone Shuffle” and this writer’s favorite, “Strollin’ With Bone,” it’s all here. For jazz fans, Mosaic is the gold standard of reissues, but its blues output has been spotty. They made up for it with this sumptuous, swinging, 146-track feast.
– Larry Nager
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JUNIOR WELLS AND HIS CHICAGO BLUES BAND WITH BUDDY GUY
Coming At You
Vanguard Records, 1969
Larger-than-life personalities defined the first generation of postwar Chicago blues legends almost as much as their music, and not an iota was lost in that department where Wells was concerned. Add a horn section and Buddy Guy at the height of his creativity (with such beautiful tone in the Vanguard days!), and Coming At You is a stone classic: tough, tight, and terrific. Wells reprises his own “Little By Little,” covers two songs by his mentor Sonny Boy II (and nails his vocal approach on a country-meets-the-city “Tobacco Road”), and nods to Muddy Waters. If “Mystery Train” looks back to Memphis, “Somebody’s Tippin’ In,” by second guitarist Lefty
Dizz, points a Howlin’ Wolf-style groove into the future over an altered boogaloo beat. I’ve read that the partnership of Junior Wells and Buddy Guy was one of expediency, to facilitate bookings. If so, thank goodness for management decisions.
–Tom Hyslop
The Complete Plantation Recordings Muddy Waters
MCA Chess
Everyone knows the Muddy Waters of “Got My Mojo Workin’ and the rest of Chicago’s blues canon. This CD goes back to prehistory, capturing a young Delta guitarist on Stovall’s Plantation playing his “Country Blues,” “32-20 Blues,” the classic-to-be “I Be’s Troubled,” (later renamed “I Can’t Be Satisfied” for Chess) and backing Son Simms’ stomping string band. There are echoes of Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson, but even back then, that great Muddy Waters voice, haunting slide, and charismatic presence are there. Recorded by Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax, it’s a revelation. And a reminder, in these tea-bagged times, just how vital the federal government can be to arts preservation.
– Larry Nager
WILLIE DIXON
The Chess Box
Chess/MCA
Of all the compilations MCA released in the late 1980s after it acquired the Chess Records catalog, Willie Dixon’s three-CD Chess Box is the oddest since it includes just a handful of songs under Dixon’s name, most notably the loping “Walking the Blues.” Instead, this 36-song collection focuses on the dozens of songs Dixon wrote and produced and sometimes played bass on for the biggest names on the Chess roster, including Muddy Waters (“Hoochie Coochie Man”), Howlin’ Wolf (“Little Red Rooster”), Koko Taylor (“Wang Dang Doodle”), Little Walter (“My Babe”), and Sonny Boy Williamson (“Bring It On Home”). Dixon’s mark on the blues – and the rock artists inspired by them (Led Zeppelin all but stole his songs) – can’t be overstated.
– Michael Cote
JIMMY REED
I’m Jimmy Reed
Vee-Jay
It was forty-eight years ago, but I flash on it all the time. I was in the dorm room of this kid from Kentucky with a wandering eye. He dropped the needle on Jimmy Reed, and he might as well have injected pure heroin in my vein. I was instantly hooked. Reed was so foreign yet so familiar at the same time. The experience suddenly put all the pieces of the rock and roll jigsaw puzzle into place, and I saw the big picture. This was the source, the pure essence, the dirt from which grew the sound that made my body, soul and mind all jump at the same time.
– Don Wilcock
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