It is fitting to take a moment here to pay respect to Samuel Charters, whom The New York Times termed a “foundational scholar of the blues” and who died on March 18, aged 85, just two weeks before the release of this collection. Throughout his prolific career, Charters sang the praises of countless country blues artists who would, without his scholarship and the work of so many others like him, indeed be unsung and unknown. His classic 1959 book The Country Blues was read to pieces by the leaders of the urban folk revival, and his scholarship inspired the rediscovery of many 1920s- and ’30s-era blues recordings, and in some cases the players themselves. A quarter of the artists who appear on The Rough Guide to Unsung Heroes of the Country Blues received notice in Mr. Charters’ first book, and many others earned mention in his later works.
So the artists collected here aren’t completely unknown. Frank Stokes, Gus Cannon, Charlie Jordan and Henry Thomas all have generous anthologies available on CD. Heck, Thomas’ “Fishing Blues”, which opens this collection, closes the most influential collection of then-unknown recordings ever released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, released as a sequence of double-LP sets in 1952 and re-released in a CD box set in 1997. What these songs and performers are, as the key word in the collection’s title emphasizes, is “unsung”. The big names, like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton and Blind Willie McTell are not here, making room for a collection of artists similarly deserving of appreciation whose work has not received widespread attention or has been pushed aside by the better-known narratives.
For instance, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, the subject of a fascinating April 2014 New York Times Magazine article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, are represented here with “Pick Poor Robin Clean”. In some cases, listeners are given an opportunity to hear nearly all there is — that is, the results of a single recording session. Henry Spaulding’s “Cairo Blues” is an example. Both his voice and his chiming ragtime guitar playing evoke comparisons to Robert Johnson, but this song comprises one half of his total recorded work. Similarly, Hambone Willie Newbern‘s “Roll and Tumble Blues” is a singular example of its originator’s genius that has become immortalized through countless cover versions.
The collection is not limited to the joy of new discovery, however. Another source of joy in this anthology comes from the surprise of the familiar when it occurs in an unexpected way. Gus Cannon, in a rare recording without his Jug Stompers, performs “Poor Boy, Long Way From Home” with the same inflections he utilized in his band’s better-known “Minglewood Blues”. Street singer Sam Collins only managed to record 19 tracks in his career, yet his “Lonesome Road Blues” contains snippets of what would later become two of Leadbelly’s most famous songs. “You caused me to weep / You caused me to moan,” he sings, evoking “Goodnight Irene”. Then, shifting to the memory of a train wreck, he sings of how “her head was found in that driver’s wheel / And her body ain’t ever been seen,” better known as the haunting lyric in “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
Compiler Neil Record curates this collection with the same mastery that Harry Smith brought to his sublime mix. The Rough Guide to Unsung Heroes of Country Blues will delight not only listeners new to the genre but also those who are deeply versed in the tradition.