Various – Mississippi Delta Blues: “Blow My Blues Away” Vol. 2 (Arhoolie)

With the Blues, more than most idioms, the onus lies not on the song, but on the performer to stamp it with his own peculiarities and personality. It’s the chief reason why a tune like “Catfish Blues” can reveal a fresh catch even on its nth reading, providing the bluesman doing the fishing is using his own pole and bait. This collection of folklorist George Mitchell’s field recordings from ’67 and ‘68 makes that case in bold letters with the caps lock emphatically in place. Deviating from the first volume, which features a dozen names, this second sampler shaves the cast down to three, five if you count Robert Nighthawk and James “Peck” Curtis (dubbed The Blues Rhythm Boys) backing Houston Stackhouse on the final four cuts. Joe Callicott gets eleven, including two vintage 1930 sides from his youth, and R.L. Burnside receives ten. The music is definitely of the Delta and its adjacent Hill Country zip codes, but takes an array of surprising detours. Callicott sounds like Mississippi John Hurt might if the latter man had the wind in sails sucked away by chronic insolvency and world weariness. A warbly yodel invests his “Lonesome Katy Blues” floating above an anchoring acoustic strum. On “Laughing to Keep From Crying” the steady buzz of a bass string keeps rhythm as he voices vignettes that advance an almost Buddhist mindset: life is suffering so you might as well have a long hard chuckle in the face of inevitable and unending adversity. Burnside’s program pays heavy respect to Muddy Waters on tunes like “Goin’ Down South” and “I Rolled and I Tumbled,” but there’s far more menace and angst imbued to his versions. Early minimalist takes on tunes like “Skinny Woman,” where a knuckle-on-wood rhythm laces his raspy vocals to create the aural illusion of the title entity tap-dancing in clogs on spindly tree branch legs, and “Long Haired Doney” presage the misogynistic persona cultivated during his later career. Amplified and heavily soused, the Stackhouse cuts are bit incongruous with what’s come before, but Curtis’ quixotic beats and daffy cowbell accents readily fulfill the requisite originality quotient.