Customer Reviews

Shake Em on Down

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

 

 

Have you ever seen Bukka White perform?
A big, burly former prize fighter, Booker T. Washington White attacked his National steel guitar with a vengeance, pounding it like a drum, and slamming the copper slide against the strings.
His playing was strongly rhythmic, sometimes sounding more like a "talking drum" than a guitar, and his voice huge and reverberating.

White reminds you of Charley Patton. He played raw, gritty, usually up-tempo blues and sang about death, despair, betrayal and misery in his hoarse and powerful voice, usually accompanied only by his own guitar playing. Like listening to Patton or Son House or "Blind" Willie Johnson, White's best songs are a profound experience.

He made his first recordings in 1930, cutting 14 songs of which only two blues songs and two religious pieces were released. (On the last two he was accompanied by a female vocalist believed to be "Memphis" Minnie McCoy, a labelmate of White's at Victor records.)

Only in 1937 did opportunity knock again, and White recorded two sides in Chicago before being sentenced to a term in prison for shooting a man, allegedly in self defence.
Both those sides are here, "Pinebluff, Arkansas", and his stark and powerful masterpiece, the intense and unforgettable "Shake 'Em On Down".

He was recorded for the Library of Congress in '39 (those sides are here as well), while serving time at the infamous Parchman Farm Penitentiary. And upon his release from prison in 1940, Bukka White recorded another 12 sides for Lester Melrose in Chicago, and these twelve sides, which became the backbone for White's live performances for the rest of his long career, round out this CD.

White recorded his best and most influential songs between 1930 and 1940, and this CD has them all. It is the most comprehensive overview of the most important period in his career.

Bukka White was a prewar bluesman whose main claim to fame was "Shake 'em on Down", the definitive reading of this track and the one that later generations of bluesmen and rock artists would turn to for inspiration. But it should be noted that a number of other tracks here are nearly as good, and so this set of songs belongs in any serious collection of prewar acoustic blues. And if you're actual a collector of such a thing, then you already know the sort of hissy, pop-ridden quality you're in for on these tracks, all of which were essentially rescued from decaying, 60-year-old pressings by advances in modern noise reduction technology.

That said, this particular release, on Catfish Records, is a track-for-track copy of a Document release called "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues" - Bukka White: The Vintage Recordings 1930-1940. In fact, if you rip the tracks from this cd onto your computer, it will identify the album as the Document release, not the Catfish release. It would seem the fine folks at Catfish merely ripped a copy of the Document CD and repackaged it. This is the sort of thing that got JSP Records into trouble not too long ago (although JSP in turn does put out amazing releases of their own), and I'm surprised a lawsuit never came of this.

Bukka is one of the greats of the Delta Blues genre, and this has him at the top of his game. At times he's making sounds come out of his guitar you'd only think could come from 2 or 3! This album is from a session he did in the 60s, and as such has much better sound quality than his Pre World War II cuts. If you like the true blues like only the real deal Bluesmen could make then you can't go wrong wit this record!

I love This CD! Collected here is all of Bukka White's prewar recordings, plus the two songs recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of congress. You will not be sorry you got this CD.

If the song titles on this cd are any indication, these are not Bukka White's pre-war recordings, but the songs he recorded for Takoma Records in 1963, the year of his rediscovery by John Fahey and Bill Barth. Bukka was just as fiery and intense in 1963 as he was in the 1930-1940 period of his first commercial recordings...and just as essential.