Customer Reviews

One-Dime Blues

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
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If Libba Cotten and MJH had gotten together and had children, their daughter would sound like Etta Baker. Buy this album if you love traditional American folk/blues played by a marvelous guitar player & banjoist.

Also, look for Etta Baker's all-instrumental album "Railroad Bill" available for sale on the Music Maker Relief Foundation web site.

I had One Dime Blues on a cassette. It got lost. For several years I was lost. Now I have it on cd and my life is back on track. This music makes me feel happy and brave and glad to be alive. Etta Baker plays the best guitar I've ever heard.

This CD would be amongst the 10 CD's for the famous desert island, i would be allowed to take with. Straight from the heart, warm and earthy, one of the best guitar player i ever heard, and believe me, i heard a lot.

Wow - fabulous fingerpicking here. What a talent. Lively stuff that somehow leaves you with a real peaceful feeling. Mostly instrumentals, but a real heartfelt and poetic vocal in Brokenhearted Blues. I still find many of the tunes luring me into a zone even after listening to them countless times. Technically this is in the Piedmont Blues category, but you don't have to be a fan of this genre to fall for this album.

Love her style of blues guitar picking. Love the mix of songs on the CD. Love her story. She's just an amazing woman. This CD must have for all blues fanatics.
I'm so sorry she isn't with us any longer.

This is one awesome lady. It's infectious. I dare anyone to listen to her play and not tap your feet to the beat.

If you enjoy Jorma Kaukonen's fingerpick style, then you really will love Etta Baker. Just listen to her version of "Police Dog Blues." She was truly a fantastic musician who should have been better-known in her lifetime.

One-Dime Blues, Etta Baker, Rounder Records, 1991

Recently I mentioned in reviewing Elizabeth Cotton's Freight Train album from Folkways that there was something appealing about these North Carolina style guitar pickers. It is different from the Delta pick, for sure. They pick cleanly, simply but with verve. The Delta is a little more heavy-handed reflecting, I think, the woes of picking that cotton all week. Damn, I would be guitar picking like Keith Richards under those conditions. Ms. Baker shows her stuff here on this almost exclusively instrumental album from Rounder Records. The one vocal that she does do here -Broken-Hearted Blues- makes me wish that she had done more vocals but the guitar can carry her through on this album- no problem. Highlights here include some old country blues classics-John Henry, Crow Jane, Railroad Bill, Spanish Fandango and so on. Nice, nice touch. Nice, nice music.

She plays John Henry as a heartbroken dirge, with bent notes like a flock of impudent and surly ghosts.