Customer Reviews

Blind Lemon Jefferson

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

 

 

Milestone's Blind Lemon Jefferson-collection gathers 25 of the seminal Texas bluesman's best songs, including the eerie "Black Snake Moan", the macabre "Hangman's Blues", and the classic "Jack O' Diamonds Blues", and the sound is surprisingly good. (Yes, I wish it had been better, too, but the original masters are long lost, and compared to other Blind Lemon-compilations, this one is actually very impressive.)

The only downside is that the song selection is not as good as it could have been...several of Lemon's best songs are missing, including "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and "'Lectric Chair Blues". But the sound? Really good.

First off,Lemon is justly named among the greats of Blues history and for good reason,-his stunning guitar fingerpicking and intricate (and odd) rhythmic measures are set to play alongside of unabashed pure emotional vocals and lyricism;from the playful air of "Crawling Baby Blues" to the haunted "Back water Blues" here was a simon-pure gifted musical artist;THAT said,there are problems here...Like a lot of Blues greats Jefferson recorded for Paramount and therein is the curse for Paramount discs were (are) the cheapest sort of bargain-basement records ever made,their cheap and rough-surfaced discs wore out pretty easily,so I'm not really blaming the folks here for the digital restoration job presented here but it makes a concerted effort to hear Lemon's guitar intricacies through the hiss and pops(though the restoration here is better than Columbia's recent reissue of the first Robert Johnson "King of the Delta Blues Singers",...the less said about THAT travesty the better!!)so if you love the Blues any which way you can get 'em then BUY THIS CD NOW! Lemon's greatness is such that it cant be snuffed out through noisy 78s,although it can be muffled a bit in spots,....

When it comes to these pre-war recordings culled from poorly manufactured 78s (it didn't get any worse than Paramount), surface hiss, crackle and pop and other distortion are unavoidable. If you want to listen to Blind Lemon Jefferson, you have little choice in this regard. This CD, however, has the most noise-reduction of any CD I've heard. If the remaining hiss, crackle and pop are still too much for you, hang it up. Jefferson (and Skip James and Ma Rainey and Charley Patton and other Paramount recording artists) are not for you. The trade-off, though, is that Jefferson's voice and guitar are muted on this CD. I preferred this approach when I started listening to blues music many years ago. But I now prefer remasterings that leave more surface noise and allow the underlying music to shine through in a much more vibrant tone. I don't notice the surface noise as much anymore on these other recordings, as it has become almost "white noise" that I can mentally tune out. The best recordings in this latter respect are:
1. Black Swan's Blind Lemon Jefferson collection Blind Lemon Jefferson
2. Yazoo's "Best of" CD The Best Of Blind Lemon Jefferson
A better attempt than the Milestone CD at removing some of the surface noise while retaining more of the underlying music might be Pristine Audio's CD, which appears to be available only as a download at its website. The extent to which Pristine Audio has succeeded in this regard has been debated at blues websites.

My brother is a music conisseur. He had been having trouble locating this cd & one other, so I got them both for Christmas. He was extatic. Although I have not personally listened to either one, his face said it all.

hiss, crackle, pop. As a guitarist, I wanted this and will not toss it out (for I may wish to study it and it's important music), but on my MP3 player I soon deleted the songs, for as they came up in a shuffle, I found myself wincing away from them because they hadn't been cleaned up. Perhaps one day, they'll be able to do better with these old recordings, or perhaps there's a cleaner version of these songs, but this is noisy to the point of being distracting.