Customer Reviews

Absolutely the Best

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What a great title for a great album.....i wont list song titles all of the good ones are here, digitally remastered and sounding great!!!! I wish i had bought this before i purchased about 10 leadbelly cd's of leser quality, becase i would have saved myself a ton of money!!!! Cool artwork and liner notes as well this is a collection worth well over the sticker price!

If you're just getting into Lead Belly, this collection isn't a bad place to start. Included are strong and tuneful renditions of Huddie's most popular songs, including "In New Orleans," "The Bourgeois Blues," "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," "Midnight Special," and of course, the immortal "Goodnight Irene." Also, the sound quality is pretty good, or at least better than some of the other Lead Belly compilations out there. My only complaint is that they included TWO versions of "John Hardy," when such standards as "Boll Weevil," "Yellow Gal," "Blue-Tailed Fly" and "Pick a Bale of Cotton" were left out. The music itself is flawless though. Five stars and then some.

This CD deserves a good rating, so I'm coming to its rescue. John Hardy is a crucial element in the Americana songlist, and both versions are individually worthwhile and unique. I enjoy this CD every time I hear it, and I can't say that for many historical compilations. Leadbelly's vocals and sense of rhythm impress on every track.

The recording was not, I'll admit, as good of clarity as the Last Sessions CD, but was better than most Highly reccomended for an intro to Leadbelly's work.

This CD is sort of OK. It has some of the songs that Lead Belly is known for (i.e., "Goodnight Irene," "House of the Rising Sun"), but they aren't portrayed in a manner that says "Yes! This is a blues artist that could have inspired generations of folk, blues, and rock artists!"

It's sort of 12-string guitar thing, folky and strummy, and it lacks the guts that you expect in a good blues recording. But, hey, Lead Belly played 12-string guitar, you say? Darn right, and he played it better on "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (Smithsonian Folkways), for example.

The recording quality here is pretty good. There's some noise, but it's better than you might expect of recordings from this era. It's the performance that suffers. Lead Belly's material is timeless, but the renditions that we have here fall short of sounding inspiring. Great artist. Check elsewhere for his great stuff.

Lead Belly wrote over one hundred songs and yet only a scant 15 are collected here over only 46 minutes. The collection bores us with 2 versions of John Hardy and misses the most famous Lead Belly song of all, Cotton Fields, a song almost every child knows.