CoronaVinyl Day 399 (Various Artists): The Best of The Blues by Various Artists

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is "Various Artists," and I listened to The Best of the Blues album from the American Epic series that accompanied the 2017 documentary film series of the same name.  I picked this up, along with some other blues albums, when I was at Third Man Records in Detroit this past November.

This is a compilation of some of the earliest blue recordings, many from the seminal Paramount recording studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, where many of the early blues musicians traveled from the South to record.  All but one song was recorded between 1927 and 1931, by some of the most important and influential early Delta blues, Piedmont blues, and country blues musicians, like Charley Patton, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Willi McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks, as well as a couple early blues women, Mattie Delaney and Geeshie Wiley. The only outlier, temporally anyway, is Robert Johnson's 1936 "Cross Road Blues," which is as much of a foundational song for rock and roll as any.

As I mentioned back in late November when I discussed the Lead Belly album I bought (which is from the same American Epic series), the engineers performed a remarkable restoration of these songs, some of which was done by using the same parts and technology that would have been originally used to press the records.  There's generally little fuzz or crackle, and it's often like you're in the room with the musicians.

If you're looking for a great introduction to early blues, I highly recommend this.  The Spotify version of the album has four additional tracks and a different order of songs.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "Future Blues" by Willie Brown
Willie Brown was a blues guitarist, largely known as a sideman.  He is famously shouted out in Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" ("tell my friend, boy Willie Brown").  One of his solo efforts, recorded in Grafton in 1930, is "Future Blues."  It's just Brown and a guitar, but he uses a guitar technique where he's strumming chords and also slapping the thicker strings to make it sound like a bass, all at the same time.  His voice is sufficiently throaty for a mere 29-year-old.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson
Apparently, if you were a blues musician named Willie in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a 2/3 chance you were blind.  This song, recorded in 1927 in Dallas, is beautifully haunting.  It's just Johnson playing his bottleneck slide guitar and humming and moaning, like a Delta funeral dirge.  The song has been used in various films, and along with the likes of music from Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," it was one of 27 samples of music included on the Voyager Golden Record on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts, which were launched into space in 1977 and are now in interstellar space over 14.4 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively.