27/03/2021
Back in the 1980s Saydisc Records in Gloucestershire embarked on the ambitious task of collecting together original 78s to document the early days of blues, ragtime, hokum and gospel music that were classified as Race Records, that is, recordings by black performers aimed specifically at black audiences. Many of the race labels were in fact subsidiaries of major record companies which had spotted the opportunity to develop an additional market.
In the early and mid-1920s the record industry was fighting off the challenge of radio, then came the dark days of the Depression when the record industry suffered like everyone else – the yearly figures for record sales plummeted from 100 million in 1929 to just 6 million in 1932.
The heroes of the time were the talent scouts who went through the Southern states searching out the often raw and primitive talent who had almost certainly never considered the prospect of going into a recording studio, although it should be noted that many of the recordings were made on location, in hotel lobbies, bars or musicians’ homes.
The musicians who got to record were often singing for nickels on street corners or entertaining in bars or at picnics, but the music that was recorded formed the backbone of the later Urban Blues, Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll and was the root of much popular music for very nearly the next 100 years.
Saydisc boss Gef Lucena already had form where the blues was concerned, with his influential 1968 album, Blues Like Showers of Rain, featuring musicians at the heart of the emerging UK country blues movement, such people as Ian Anderson, Jo-Ann Kelly, Dave Kelly, and the Missouri Compromise.
Gef fondly refers to that time as Blues from the Avon Delta, the album being recorded in Bristol on Sunday afternoons before performances at Ian Anderson’s Folk Blues Bristol and West club.
Noted Austrian collector Johnny Parth was tasked with locating the original 78s which he did through his Europe-wide network of contacts. The remastered recordings culminated in the Saydisc Matchbox Bluesmaster series of 42 LP albums of blues music originally recorded between 1924 and 1934, with a few tracks from 1950. The series was ground-breaking, exposing the work of largely unknown blues performers, work which otherwise might have been permanently lost.
Last summer, taking the opportunity to investigate the dark corners of the Saydisc archive, they stumbled across all the test pressings for the 1980s Bluesmaster releases in pristine condition. Nimbus archivist Hans Klement was put in charge of restoration and remastering and the result is a series of seven releases on CD and online, each consisting of six CDs with the original 1980s liner notes by one of the most respected of all UK blues writers, Paul Oliver.
Competitively priced at £29.99 for each six-CD boxset, the first two sets are now on release. Three more sets will see the light of day during 2021, with the remaining two set for Spring and Summer next year.
The first two sets comprise nine CDs featuring one musician or band: Buddy Boy Hawkins, Bo Weavil Jackson, Peg Leg Howell and Texas Alexander on MSESET 1, Skip James, Coley Jones & the Dallas String Band, Leroy Carr, Tommie Bradley/James Cole and Charlie Lincoln on MSESET 2.
The remaining three CDs are compilations of the work of various bluesmen, many of whom recorded only the handful of tracks included here. In fact the Bluesmaster series gives a comprehensive picture of most of the performers here.
Walter ‘Buddy Boy’ Hawkins, for instance, is so obscure the almost nothing is known of his life except for the 12 tracks he recorded from 1927 to 1929, tracks so rare that the originals sell for between $500 and $1500. His default position tends to an intense, somewhat monotone vocal delivery at dirge-like tempos backed by accomplished guitar work, but on some of the later tracks there’s a jaunty vaudeville feeling, with sprightly ragtime guitar on Raggin’ the Blues and A Rag Blues, hints of a double act on Sn**ch It and Grab It and a bizarre pseudo-vent act on Voice Throwin’ Blues. Paul Oliver surmises that it’s likely that Hawkins was an entertainer on a medicine show – I’ll go along with that!
Obscure doesn’t necessarily mean lacking in influence. A CD of Ragtime Blues Guitar includes William Moore, whose songs have been covered by a host of later performers including Stefan Grossman and even The Notting Hillbillies, and Blind Willie Walker, described by Josh White as the best guitarist he ever heard (‘like Art Tatum’) and reputed to be the composer of songs attributed to Reverend Gary Davis – for all that, Walker’s issued recordings consist of two takes of one song and one take of another. Moore is a most engaging performer, with his ragtime dance rhythms on his guitar, laconic spoken blues and drolly catchy songs such a Ragtime Millionaire. Walker is something else, a darkly brooding Dupree Blues followed by guitar pyrotechnics on two takes of South Carolina Rag.
A hefty proportion of the tracks in the first set feature a single singer/guitarist, but the second set takes us into the world of string and jug bands. Coley Jones is a one-man variety bill, delivering droll monologues to his own guitar accompaniment, duetting with Bobbie Cadillac (‘a Dallas woman of some reputation’, according to Paul Oliver) and heading up the Dallas String Band with his mandolin – an exhilarating Dallas Rag a highlight. Jones also connects with the mainstream music scene with show tunes such as Ford Dabney’s Shine and scatting on Sugar Blues. James Cole’s violin features in a number of bright little groups with guitarist Tommie Bradley, washboards, jugs and kazoos in attendance – there’s no lack of variety in the collection!
Many of the singers here lived their lives in parallel with better known names – Charley Lincoln or Hicks, brother of Barbecue Bob, was so derailed by his brother’s early death that he ended his days in prison in Cairo, Georgia, for murder – but three of the biggest names in country blues have a CD apiece – and they don’t disappoint.
Leroy Carr is heard on 1928 sessions with his long-time musical partner, subtle guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Carr’s singing and piano playing have a sophistication and control that clearly point the way to a later generation of performers.
Though he sticks to the basic 12-bar blues (or 8 bars, as in the case of his iconic How Long, How Long Blues, repeated several times in this collection), he is anything but primitive. After his comeback in the 1960s Skip James needs no introduction to blues fans. Here we have 18 tracks from 1931, his high-pitched, often plaintive singing accompanied either by his guitar or his distinctive brand of barrelhouse piano.
A few of the tracks suffer from the poor sound quality of the originals (surprisingly rare on these albums) but the impact is undiminished. Texas Alexander was so prolific compared to many of the others that this is just Volume 1: Volumes 2 and 3 come later in the Bluesmaster series. Paul Oliver stresses that Alexander’s titles were ‘blues of the most rural kind’, yet he often worked with surprisingly sophisticated accompanists: here mostly the great Lonnie Johnson (consistently brilliant) and, on four tracks, jazz pianist Eddie Heywood. Oliver claims Alexander and Heywood were ill-matched, but it doesn’t really show – and it’s an unexpected treat to find Mama, I Heard You Brought it Right Back Home sounding like Old Fashioned Love.
Such is the range of this collection that it’s impossible to cover all the performers, so, with apologies to those we omitted, let’s give one of them, New Orleans singer/guitarist Rabbit Brown, the last word:
‘I done seen better days, but I’m putting up with these.’
A fair summary of the blues!
