VA: - Bluesology 3CD

Tuotetiedot

• Condition New
• Type 2-CD
• Vendor Not Now Music
• SKU 5060342021212
• Artisti VA:
• Lyhyt kuvaus If you think these three discs will reduce you to a blabbering basket case, or cause your family to remove sharp implements from your reach, then think again. The blues has a reputation for misery that’s scarcely recognised by the people who play it. Take Buddy Guy: ‘Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with “Blues” on it. They said, “You play blues. That music is so sad.” I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, “You didn’t play one sad song.”’ 
 Singer/guitarist Guy contributes ‘First Time I Met The Blues’ to our collection – and he is typical of a generation of bluesmen who left home in the postwar years in search of stardom. When he hit Chicago in 1957, fresh from his native Louisiana, he admits he was ‘as square as a billiard table and just as green’. He was still touring the word over 50 years later, playing his music and declaring, ‘A lot of people have told me the blues is like whiskey – the longer you leave it in the barrel the better it gets!’ BB King acquired his ‘Blues Boy’ name in Beale Street in downtown Memphis, Tennessee – but, like Guy, was an incomer from the country. Mississippi-born King’s seventh RPM release, ‘Three O’Clock Blues’, was the first of many to hit the Billboard R&B listings in 1952, the Lowell Fulson-inspired number staying at Number 1 for over three months. Like Buddy Guy, King found a ready audience in the black workforce that had come to urban centres during wartime and stayed to fuel the growing US economy. When it comes to legendary figures, the blues has a surfeit. But they don’t come any more legendary – or mysterious – than Robert Johnson. The tale that he had ‘sold his soul’ to the devil at an unidentified crossroads in exchange for exceptional musical gifts came about after a spell away from his plantation home. Johnson allegedly returned with an impressive technique, much to the astonishment of his fellow musicians. The legend would be rubber-stamped when he was poisoned in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1938 while playing a dance. The devil’s due? It certainly seemed so to his contemporaries. Elmore James was a disciple of Robert Johnson In both his guitar-playing and his repertoire. Both were born in Mississippi a handful of years apart – but while Johnson cut his historic sessions in 1936-37, Elmore didn’t record until 1951, when he laid down the first of many versions of ‘Dust My Broom’. His distinctive slide-guitar style, heard here on that very number, would be influential on the likes of Fleetwood Mac. The blues can often be one man and a guitar – but whether it’s electric or acoustic may tell you a lot about the person playing it. The country blues that had proliferated in the immediate postwar years had to plug in when its performers hit the bustling bars and clubs of the city. They simply had to amplify themselves to be heard. Not that you have to own a guitar to play the blues. Little Walter Jacobs, Sonny Boy Williamson and Junior Wells are harmonica-players who kept their backing band in their pocket and could blow up a storm by means of that uniquely emotional instrument. Blues artists were often ripped off and went unrewarded for their recorded effort, by accident or design. As guitarist Otis Rush, who came to fame in the late Fifties on Chicago’s short-lived Cobra label, said, ‘A guy will promise you the world and give you nothin’ – and that’s the blues.’ He wasn’t the only one to suffer at the hands and ethics of the music business. Paradoxically, if and when blues stars finally ‘made it’, it often became more difficult for them to play with passion. ‘There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to,’ bemoaned the late, great 
Muddy Waters. ‘When I play in Chicago, I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues – the blues we used to have when we had no money.’ John Lee Hooker had to wait until he was in his seventies before he enjoyed real rewards for his labours. His 1989 album ‘The Healer’, featuring guests such as Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, Los Lobos and Canned Heat, went on to top 1.5 million sales worldwide. Accolades came thick and fast. In 1991 he won a coveted WC Handy award and was inducted into the newly established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while in 1992 a remake of ‘Boom Boom’ (a vintage version of which is included here) made him the oldest person ever to reach the UK Top 5. A Grammy Lifetime Achivement Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame also followed. Let’s leave the last word to Hooker, who died in 2001 at the age of 83. ‘The blues tells a story,’ he said. ‘Every line of the blues has a meaning.’ The 75 stories these songs tell make fascinating listening: enjoy three hours plus of Bluesology…
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