Blue Friday

Cherry Hill - Big Bill Broonzy
from All The Classic Sides 1928-1937 (JSP).
Broke Down Engine - Blind Willie McTell
from The Definitive Blind Willie McTell (Columbia).

Another post inspired by a good book, in this case Elijah Wald's Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. The book is a pretty wide ranging exploration of early blues, and utilizes the story of Robert Johnson as a focus point to consider early blues as a whole. The book is interesting to fans and novices of the blues and to anyone who is interested in American pop music history. Today's post was inspired by a small component of the book that discusses how later (largely white) generations rewrote the history of the blues by focusing on some of the more romantic characters, such as Robert Johnson, who were largely romantic because they never made it very big and their recordings were ultra rare or nearly lost. I think there is a lesson in their somewhere for many of the readers of this site.

Anyways, it would make sense to post some Robert Johnson track, but honestly everyone should have his complete works since they all fit on a single CD and are uniformly wonderful. Largely because of that album I've looked into a lot of other Delta and country Blues artists, and have only occasionally found gold. You hae to deal with compilations with often staggeringly bad audio quality for the sake of completeness (the Blind Blake compilation comes to mind). But up here are two tracks, I've enjoyed. The first is "Cherry Hill" by Big Bill Broonzy who was incredibly popular early in his career (like this recording) and regained his fame by going back to this old-timey style in 50s. In between he was a very big influence in creating the Chicago blues (read electric) style. I definitely prefer his acoustic picking style, and his showy vocals here backed by a pianist identified only as Black Bob (Like whoa!).

Also up is "Broke Down Engine" by Blind Willie McTell (actually blind from early in childhood if not birth). McTell played the 12-string guitar also enjoyed a long career even if his surviving recorded output is somewhat limited now. People like my parents would know this song because Bob Dylan covered it, but to me the vocals are haunting in the contrast to the toe tap induced by the guitar work. And when he knocks on his guitar body to accentuate the "knocking on my door" lyrics it is a nice touch (also it makes me think I have an IM message, but that's another story).