Customer Reviews

Southern Journey, Vol. 3: 61 Highway Mississippi - Delta Country Blues, Spirituals, Work Songs & Dance Music

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These days, it's easy to forget that folk music is made by ... well, folks. And not folks in Greenwich Village. These field recordings are stunning in their breadth, clarity, and subtlety. The singers have played these songs for years and have a homey, bright feel to them. "God's Unchanging Hand" is beautiful, slow, deliberate gospel, and "Fred McDowell's Blues" is earthy and transcendent at once. This is my favorite field recording EVER.

I love the Southern Journey series, and this particular volume is heavily into blues. The first field recordings, actually the first recordings ever, of Fred McDowell alone make this essential listening. For anyone with more than a passing interest in country delta blues this cd is essential. The spirituals and work songs are absolute magic. This is the real deal, not something dreamed up in a recording studio.

These recordings take blues to a higher level. To hear an artist clear his throat or a dog barking in the backround in the middle of a song, it doesnt get anymore real than this. A fantastic mix of styles plus the stories behind the songs in the sleeve. Its one of the best field hollering collections I own. Lomax was a genius to preserve this music and artistry, my only regret, I wish I accompanied him in the process of gathering these historical recordings. I would of loved to meet the men and women creating this music....

I have spent a fair amount of time recently reviewing, individually and on various artist compilations, performers from the 1960's urban folk revival. You know, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt and the like. I have also reviewed the earlier performers who influenced them on the more traditional folk side like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. There was another component of that search for roots that entailed heading south to the Mississippi Delta (or the hills of North Carolina) and getting `religion' on the black country blues scene.

I mentioned in a review of the performers who influenced the 1960's urban folk scene that it did not fall from the sky but had been transmitted by earlier performers. That, my friends, applies as well to the search for the blues. I also mentioned that we all, later when we understood things better, appreciated that John and Allan Lomax did yeomen's service to roots music by their travels into the hinterlands in the 1930's and 1940's (and had Pete Seeger tag along for a year and thus serve as a little transmission belt to the latter generation) to find blues, mountain and other types of American traditional music. However, most of us got our country blues infusion second-hand through our addiction to local coffeehouses and the performers who provided us entertainment. They, in turn, learned their material from the masters who populate this CD.

This CD compilation is filled with the legends of the genre like the renowned Mississippi Fred McDowell (a major influence on and mentor of Bonnie Raitt). Moreover it contains fife and drum music from North Mississippi, which can be traced back to the African roots, and work songs that do not get nearly enough attention (including by this reviewer) as the work of the Delta artists like McDowell, Son House, John Hurt and Bukka White. Nicely done.