Living Country Blues
An Anthology
(Evidence 26105-2)
By the year 1980 most Cryptozoologists and Ethnomusicologists agreed
that the country blues had met its end by being sucked into the
approaching Disco void. A few dissenters refused to accept this
inevitability. They hung onto antecdotal tales of mythical in Southern
backwaters. One of these diehards was a young German postal worker, Alex
Kustner, who along with sound technician Siegfried A. Christmann persuaded
European impresario Horst Lippmann to finance an expedition to find out
once and for all if the musical genre had survived the onslaught of the
juggernaut of American mass culture. What they found was amazing! It is
now available for the first time in America on Living Country Blues: An
Anthology.
Traveling from Virginia to Mississippi they recorded a wide
variety of musicians singing and playing old style country blues, street
corner gospel, one string guitar, fife and drums, jugs and field hollers.
These for the most part were not the recording artists of the Golden Age
of the '20's and '30's. These were musicians who despite their obscurity
had great facility as musicians. Some like Phil Wiggins, John Cephas, Son
Thomas and Lonnie Pitchford would go on to become better known. Others
like Lottie Murrell a riveting performer, would fade once again into the
shadows. Unfortunately at the time of this writing most of these artists
have passed on.
To me part of the beauty of this music is its eccentricity
and unpredictability. Fortunately this set contains a healthy dose of
both: Cedell Davis' "avant garde" slide guitar playing, Lonnie
Pitchford's electric one string guitar, Hammie Nixon alternately playing
harmonica and jug as if he was twins, the broom accompanying Son Thomas
and of course the elemental trance like fife and drum band of Othar
Turner. This set is an essential glimpse of a world that would soon pass
(recent releases by Fat Possum and the Music Maker Foundation however may
prove that the death knell for country blues is premature). The sound
quality even though recorded in the field is excellent. There is a feeling
of reality here that no studio could ever begin to capture-the sounds of a
lost world.
- Joe Brennen -
Southwest Blues CD Review - January 2000
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