14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Poor Blues Reference Book, May 16, 1999
This review is from: The Best of the Blues: The 101 Essential Blues Albums (Paperback)
If a guy whose passion was really rock and roll were to write a book on essential blues, this would be it. All the recommendations are safe rock 'n' roller type picks which aren't bad just inconsistant and incomplete due to unfamiliarity with the genre. The real crime is that essential people are left out like Robert Nighthawk. Buy the AMG Blues Guide instead and make your own top 100.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A bit overly ambitious to claim THE Best of the Blues", May 3, 1999
This review is from: The Best of the Blues: The 101 Essential Blues Albums (Paperback)
I really appreciated Robert Santelli's "Big Blues Book", but his book "The Best of the Blues - 101 Essential Albums" leaves much to be desired. I do not profess to be a blues expert, but I have been an avid fan since the mid '50s, have about 200 blues albums and know a bit about the music. The selections in the book are curious if nothing else. For example, there are three albums by Skip James and two by Paul Butterfiled yet there are none by Sleepy John Estes, Robert Nighthawk, Lightnin' Slim, Houston Stackhouse or Lazy Lester. I bought this book expecting (after the great "Big Blues Book") to find some albums I am missing from my collection. Not so! All I got was a book expressing an opion that shorts some great blues artists. Unless you are new to blues, I would pass on this book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Found it very useful, but..., August 15, 2003
This review is from: The Best of the Blues: The 101 Essential Blues Albums (Paperback)
As soon as I saw the listing of 101 top blues recordings I knew that many people would be angry that their favorites weren't included. But the writer freely admits in the introduction that other choices could be possible. I really respect the research that he did--eventually acquiring over 1000 blues CDs, not to mention the scads of vinyl LPs that he already had. Sounds like he has listened to a lot more blues than any of the reviewers that have written here.
But there is a certain inconsistency in Santelli's presentation. He sometimes sneaks in another recommendation or two under an album's description. For instance when describing "As Blue As A Man Can Be" by Robert Pete Williams, he also gives a strong recommendation to "When A Man Takes The Blues". A better organization and title for the book would have been: The 101 Essential Blues Artists. Then under each artist he could have recommended their essential recordings. Also, why the fixation with the number "101". By firmly adhering to 101 albums he excluded several essential artists.
Another complaint is that with multiple recommendations for some artists like Skip James and Big Mama Thorton, other very significant people in the blues, like Willie Dixon got skipped. And, Santelli sometimes makes the wrong recommendations. For instance, the Muddy Waters Chess Box Set has 3 CDs for a good price and is a better buy than buying "The Best of Muddy Waters" and "Trouble No More: The Singles" separately (the Box Set combines both of those CDs and more). He also gives Muddy Waters too many slots (four is too much for one artist), e.g., you don't need to buy Real Folk Singer--a sampling of that album is included in the above mentioned Muddy Waters Chess Box. He gives Little Walter 2 slots in his 101 albums hierarchy when both of his recommendations are can be purchased together, for a better price, in The Essential Little Walter Chess Box (has 2 CDs),and then only take one position in the 101 list.
In Dixon's case, as predominately a songwriter and bass player, he mostly plays on other musicians' records like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and many others but his "I Am the Blues" album or his Chess Box Set should have been included to give him the recognition that he deserves. Willie's songs MADE Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter. For those of you not familiar with Dixon's work, he wrote Spoonful (made famous by Cream), Same Thing (recorded by many artists), Backdoor Man (covered by many including John Hammond and The Doors), I Can't Quit You Baby (Led Zepplin), The Seventh Son (Johnny Rivers), I Ain't Superstitous (Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart), You Shook Me (Led Zepplin), Little Red Rooster (many including The Rolling Stones), Hoochie Coochie Man (countless artists including John Lee Hooker), and I Just Want To Make Love To You (a blues and rock standard). This is just a tiny sampling of what Willie Dixon wrote and of course, all of the songs that I listed were core songs in the repertoire of the late, great Chess artists.
Other artists that should have been included, and, not including them was a gross oversight, (either that, or Santelli doesn't really know the blues as much as he claims), are: Leadbelly, Big Joe Williams, Sonny & Brownie, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker and Roy Buchanan. Other possible inclusions may have been: Sleepy John Estes, John Hammond, Lowell Fulson, James Cotton, Luther Allison, William Clarke and George Thorogood.
But still, despite the many flaws in Santelli's book, it is a must read for any fan of the blues. It is a great book just to learn about the history of the blues and to whet one's appetite for the recordings of artists that you may not have heard about, like Scrapper Blackwell, Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside and CeDell Davis. Just remember as you read the book, that there are many fine artists that Santelli didn't cover.
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