Balling the Jack: Birth of Nu-Blues

Various Artists (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (February 26, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Ocho
• ASIN: B00005Y6RV
• Also Available in: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #674,020 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Lucky's Tune - Reid Paley

2. Oooh Baby - Asie Payton' Go Gittas Camp

3. Big In Japan - Tom Waits

4. Road Song - Jimpson And Group

5. Mississippi KKKrossroads - Chris Thomas King

6. Someday Baby - North Mississippi Allstars

7. Electricity - Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band

8. Stagger Lee - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

9. Strange Things Happen Everyday - Olu Dara

10. Slow Down Train - Pig In A Can

11. Poison Tree - Gary Lucas

12. Give It To The Soft Boys - The Soft Boys

13. This Wondrous Day - Billy Childish & His Famous Headcoats

14. Border Line - Petit Vodo

15. Find My Baby - Moby

16. Lost And Found - Penny Lang

17. Let My Baby Ride - R.L. Burnside

18. Postcard Blues - Cowboy Junkies

19. A Picture From Life's Other Side - Johnny Dowd

20. String Round A Stick - Bob Logg III

See all 21 tracks on this disc

Editorial Reviews

21 track compilation subtitled 'The Birth Of The Nu-Blues', featuring Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Captain Beefheart, Moby, Billy Childish, R.L. Burnside, Cowboy Junkies, Diamanda Galas, North Mississippi Allstars & many more. 2002.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Devil's Music Deconstructed, August 19, 2005

By 

Laurence Upton (Wilts, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Balling the Jack: Birth of Nu-Blues (Audio CD)

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, the blues isn't dead, it just smells funny.

Since the big blues boom of the sixties, when every beat group had a few twelve-bar blues in their repertoire, the genre has been slowly and sadly sidelined, firstly by disco and dance culture, then by punk and everything else, until a point was reached when an admission for a fondness for the form was a short-cut to social pariah-hood. By way of self-preservation a sanitized form of the blues entered the mainstream, but politeness never suited it and corporate acceptance served only to further marginalize the genuine article.

Blues had been recorded from the start of the commercial recording industry in the nineteen-twenties and had been handed down in an oral history beginning in Africa countless generations beforehand, so there never could never be any doubt that in the long term it would endure.

Exactly what the blues is and the criteria required to authentically perform it has been endlessly speculated, most fervently during the blues beat boom (q.v. The Bonzo Dog Band - Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?), and the auteur compiler of this collection celebrating its re-invention, Joe Cushley, takes an especially eclectic view.

Taking tracks that are not essentially blues songs by artists who are not essentially blues performers, such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Gary Lucas, Billy Childish and his Famous Headcoats and the Soft Boys, and putting them in the context of a number of idiosyncratic blues and blues-influenced artists ranging from RL Burnside to Captain Beefheart, results in an illuminating and surprisingly coherent listen. The most successful are often those that take the largest liberties with what Joe Cushley calls the "hell-hound sound."

One inevitably speculates on other artists who might have been included in place of the few slightly weaker tracks on the disc, and perhaps excluded due to licensing limitations. The most obvious omissions are Jimi Hendrix who brilliantly revitalized everything he touched, and the pioneering Howlin' Wolf, but recent champions must include PJ Harvey, the White Stripes, Dr John and Little Axe, while honourable mentions should go to Dr Feelgood for keeping the spirit of the blues alive during the punk wars. I look forward to these and names yet unknown to us to inform the sequel.