Various - Dig These Blues, the Legendary Dig Masters

Among the multitude of storefront R&B labels that littered the regional music marketplaces of the Fifties, I can’t think of one that had a more pithy and fitting name than Dig. The roster fit the succinct title to a “T” too. Obscure personalities like the landlubbin’ Sailor Boy and Hozay, a Mercy Dee Walton devotee, vied with barely better-knowns like Abe Moore and Preston Love for paltry PR dollars. This Ace comp contains some of the cream of that tiny provincial crop. Tunes bridged rural and urban by tastes mixing hot horn sections with the equally ardent sounds of bracingly amplified guitars to the degree that the mics were occasionally overloaded. Lyrics didn’t break any molds, but the performers still managed to personalize the verses. Slim Green and the Cats from Fresno were a crew with roots more firmly planted in the menacing boogie-built sounds of the Motor City than any laidback Left Coast locale. Their “Old Folks’ Boogie” spins off the John Lee Hooker’s protean single chord “Boogie Chillun”, twin guitars dipped in acidic reverb, chugging across a loping drum beat as a booting tenor blares a honking lead. The colloquially-minded Moose John mines similar territory on the rockabilly-infused “Talkin’ ‘Bout Me” while Sidney Maiden brings some wailing harmonica to the Cats sound on “Hand Me Down Baby”, blasting through a dimestore amp with excoriating glee. Dig did eventually end up earning enough capital to record relative celebrities like Johnny Otis and Sugarcane Harris, the latter represented by two closing cuts that do little to showcase his fiddle prowess, but still pack plenty of punch. Blues works particularly well to compendium form where the potential tedium of the idiom gets broken up by individual eccentricity. The folks at Ace remain true to their name in terms of sequencing a deck with a satisfying series of selections and this early effort is no exception in terms of coming up with that particular suit.