Various - Alan Lomax: Blues Songbook (Rounder)

The Lomaxes logged more miles in jalopies both wheeled and winged than most of their academic brethren combined. They plucked the operative “armchair” out of the prevailing musicological attitude of their day and hit to the roads both domestic and foreign, searching out and preserving human culture through recorded sound. This set holds the dubious ‘cachet’ of a release date contemporaneous with Martin Scorsese mixed-success Blues Project for PBS. The director pens the preface to the liners, but the real annotative gold comes in a lengthy essay by John Cowley, track-by-track distillations and period photos that follow. Yet these absorbing trappings are a distant second to the trove that embodies the music: 41 performances parceled over two generously programmed discs and occupying just under 140-minutes.

Reach here encompasses a breadth of blues styles from Delta dirges to Old Timey string band to barrelhouse stomps, by both black and white purveyors. Rather than adhering to strict chronological or catholic parameters in their selections the compilers go for playability. The ad hoc-sounding order allows for some surprising confluences. Just A/B the antediluvian croak and spidery banjo twang of Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues,” taped in concert at his Newport Festival appearance in ’66 with Skip James’ ethereal falsetto menace on a rendering of “Cherry Ball Blues” from the same stage location (oh, to have been in attendance at that event). Elsewhere, Jack Owens & Buddy Spires, contemporaries of Skip and interpreters of his Bentonia style, try their hands at the tune and come up with a deliciously ramshackle improv jam. Another track that took me unawares, the original 1937 field recording of “Trouble So Hard” by Dock Reed and Vera Ward Hall that was copped by Moby and transmogrified into an international dance club hit (!) Also in the mix: vintage Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, Blind Willie McTell, Hobart Smith, Pete Johnson, R.L. Burnside, Canray Fotenot & Bois sec Ardoin, Mississippi Fred McDowell and a slew of others. Ten titles are previously unreleased.

Spinning these discs in the car makes the miles melt away in a manner the Lomaxes would no doubt have appreciated on their own enervating travels. It’s akin to winning an admission ticket to a wang dang doodle at the Great Juke Joint in the Sky (or its afterlife analogue officiated by Old Scratch down below, as the case may be).