Customer Reviews

Stop & Listen

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Read the liner notes. When he was a teenager Muddy Waters walked all day long to hear the Mississippi Sheiks! Much of Bob Wills's music starts with the Mississippi Sheiks. Their version of Sitting on Top of the World was performed by Wills note for note, word for word, in all of his recordings of the tune from the 1930s to the 1960s recording where he has Vicki Carr singing in the backgrounds to Sheiks music!
I have hipped friends who are serious violinists to the Sheiks and they have come back with words of praise for the fiddling here. As a sometimes blues singer myself, I wish I could do the tunes with half the power and joy you find here.
Curiously, the sheiks were just as, or often more popular with white audiences as they were with Blacks. In fact, they recorded several tunes under other names in the traditional string band style that were released as white hilly billy records and not race records!
They've been neglected because they do not meet the fantasy that blues players, particularly from Mississippi, are guitar playing, slide playing, Delta people. But when Muddy Waters was coming up on Stovals Planation, these guys were so good he walked all day to hear them.
Too much of this history makes one forget that this is just great music to listen to, to make you mellow, smiling, and knowledgeable about life.

From the first song on this CD "Stop and Listen" my mouth dropped open in awe. The record could have come out yesterday and it would be good, but knowing that this came out 25 years before rock and roll was even invented is just incredible.

Listen to Walter Vinson's mournful singing "Cant ya, a-hear me talking pretty mama" and you just know this is where it all began. I'm picturing them sitting at the local gas station under the hot sun in some Mississippi desert with nobody listening to these beautiful yet bizarre blues songs except some toads. I can't believe these guys aren't as famous as Robert Johnson because they are right there in that class. Their biggest claim to fame is that they originated "Sitting on Top of the World" which has been recorded by the Dead and many other blues musicians, but it doesn't even begin to represent their amazing work. Great violin and guitar, low key and fairly simple but it has everything it needs to get the point across. Some neat melodies like in "Too Long", some great lyrics like in "He Calls That Religion", cool stories like in "Blood in My Eyes for You". This is the real deal.

This collection was put together in part by Stefan Grossman who I believe uncovered a lot of Rev Gary Davis's stuff back in the early 60s. I have been listening to this solidly for weeks and can't seem to stop.

I agree with the previous Music Fan who reviewed this disc - this truly is remarkable stuff!
Perhaps what is most striking is that it preserves the sound of African-American fiddling,a tradition already fading away when these 78s were first waxed and today is all but deceased,-the playing of the Blues on the fiddle is particularly poignant (listen to how cleverly the fiddle counterpoints the sung verses on "Stop and Listen" for a start!),-this music is both a priceless preservation of a lost tradition and first-rate Delta blues performances (even if the Sheiks spent much of their time in and around Jackson,Miss.).
This cd will appeal to ALL blues lovers AND to Bluegrass and Western Swing fiddle fans as well - the Bluesy fiddling here will fascinate fans of Bluegrass fiddle great Alison Krauss and pioneering Western Swing fiddler Bob Wills.
The digital restoration follows in Yazoo's exemplary excellent standards and the liner notes are very informative and a provocative read.
In short,the whole family of fiddle tastes should snap this one up!

The Mississippi Sheiks are the missing link, so to speak, between what we now know as Delta Blues and traditional rural black stringband music. Their songs have been recorded by everyone from the Camp Creek Boys to Bob Wills to the Grateful Dead (Stop and Listen Blues is the predecessor to Smokestack Lightnin').

Although our romantic notions of early Delta blues want to make Robert Johnson the hero of this time period in American music, Johnson was actually quite unpopular in his time. The Sheiks were the reigning heroes and should be remembered as such.

Fiddle players should listen carefully to this record, as Lonnie Chatmon uses several odd cross-tunings that aren't common in any fiddle repertoire. Guitar players should simply sit in awe at Bo Chatmon's (aka Bo Carter's) guitar playing on the selected tracks where he sits in, and marvel at the sparse delicacy of Walter Vinson's guitar playing.

The Mississippi Sheiks were truly their own chapter in American music history, there was no other band quite like them nor will there ever be. Pick up this record, you'll be so glad you did.

Don't stop, O Lordy, don't stop,
Go On! Go On! Go get this music NOW!
It'll move you Baby, move you all night and day.....