History Unlimited: Classic Blues Albums Available from Amazon

The blues were the fountainhead of 20th century popular music.

History Unlimited

co.uk

In association with Amazon

Introduction to the Blues Store

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Ordering From This Site

Ordering the CD or Boxed Set of your choice is simple and straightforward. Placing your cursor on an individual title will reveal a Preview panel giving the current price, average customer rating and access to the Amazon Shopping Basket. For more product information click on the title to go to the full Amazon page, from where you can also make a purchase. Use your back button to return to History Unlimited — your Shopping Basket will keep your selection until you return to the Amazon site (so long as you have cookies enabled). Use the Amazon Search Boxes for titles that are not included in our selection.

Important Information

· Featured Album titles will take you to individual album pages where you will find Track Listings, Reviews and, in some cases, Audio Sampling of selected tracks. Please note that you will need RealPlayer to sample audio tracks. A free download is available from our Affiliate Shop.

· Amazon prices are typically between 10% and 30% off list. Single orders of over £15.00 in value are usually eligible for free delivery in the UK.

· Most orders will be dispatched within 2-3 days, but please refer to the Amazon page for delivery details for individual CDs.

· If a CD is temporarily out of stock it is possible to pre-order. You will be informed by e-mail when the item becomes available.

· Please note that the publishers are not party to or responsible for any purchases made from Amazon as a result of visiting the History Unlimited site. Transactions are between the purchaser and Amazon, and Amazon will be responsible for all aspects of fulfilment of your order. Any queries on orders should be sent directly to Amazon via their web site. The publishers of History Unlimited will not have access to your personal or payment details.

· We have made every effort to provide accurate information, but purchasers are strongly advised to check the details provided on the Amazon site before ordering.

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Mud, Sweat & Tears

The brief thirty year period between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the end of the Great War witnessed the birth of artists who were to give form and continuity to the most potent ever influence on contemporary popular music. Most were only two or three generations away from slavery. Many were born into the exploitative sharecropping economy of the post-bellum plantations. Some drew comfort from evangelical religion; more found themselves on the wrong side of the spiritual tracks, attracted by the juke houses, unsavoury nightspots and sporting houses of the Delta and the Southwest. Too many were drawn to vice and violence and bootleg hooch and spent time in the penal institutions of the Deep South. All suffered the invidious tyranny of racism and segregation.

Their music drew on many sources. The blues took ‘call-and-response’ from ancestral memories of lost homelands in West and Central Africa. The uneasy proximity of slavemasters and the poor whites of the rural South introduced themes and rhythms from Scottish and Irish folk song. Black Baptist tradition contributed gospel music and spirituals. The field shouts and hollers of the plantation and the work songs of the prison farm added texture. All of these and more were melded to produce themes that resonated with the universal experience of hardship, poverty and injustice, love found or lost, infidelity and retribution, or the search for meaning and the consolation of belief. The early bluesmen were often self-taught, on makeshift or hand-me-down instruments. They honed their craft in isolation or at the feet of the masters of the day and sometimes formed fluid temporary partnerships. But at the core and soul of country blues was the solo performer, self-accompanied on guitar with side helpings of plaintive harmonica.

The songs were made by black Americans for black Americans and were at first segregated by record producers and broadcasters as ‘race music’, unfit for the sensitive ears of a white audience. But the raw power of the blues was eventually to transcend the barriers of prejudice and add to the rich heritage of American traditional music in innumerable ways. The blues sent out strands that intertwined with ragtime, jazz and country, or were diluted and hybridised for easy consumption by the population at large. Firmly rooted in the rich loam of Mississippi, the tendrils spread from the country to the towns, north to Chicago, Detroit and New York, west to the Pacific and eastwards to England, Europe and the world. As the blues crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic they fed the creative explosion of the 1950s and 1960s that changed popular music for all time. Since then every new generation has found stimulation in the generation that finally passed away with the passing of another century and the passing of John Lee Hooker.

Brief glimpses into the lives of Lead Belly, Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and the rest may give a hint of why and how and where the blues were made. But the real story of the blues is best told by the songs of the men who sang them.

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