Texas Worried Blues

Henry Thomas | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 27, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Yazoo
• ASIN: B000000G8B
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #130,897 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #70 in Music > Indie Music > Blues > Traditional Blues

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic CD, but the liner notes?..., March 1, 2003

By 

Jonathan (Florence, AL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Texas Worried Blues (Audio CD)

This CD, containing every one of Henry Thomas's recordings, is a must-have if you're a fan of Lead Belly and other black musicians who performed pre-blues and early blues(but you probably won't care for it if you're expecting to hear something similar to Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf). Thomas's songs are full of energy and humor, the delicacy with which he played the quills providing an interesting contrast with his rough guitar and vocal style.
My only quibble with Yazoo's otherwise excellent packaging has to do with the liner notes written by Stephen Calt. Couldn't they have found someone who had more favorable things to say about Thomas? While acknowledging Thomas's deft picking on the few straight blues numbers like "Texas Easy Street Blues", Calt questions the "documentary value" of this music--in other words, he seems to have serious doubts as to whether Thomas was representative of the black music of his time. He points out the influence of white music on Thomas's recordings, but the same thing can be said of every black musician of his generation(Thomas was born in the 1870s); blacks and whites often performed and recorded the same songs.
There is one point in particular, albeit a minor one, on which I question Calt's analysis. He calls Thomas's "Shanty Blues", a slide piece, "a truncated version of a hillbilly song Fiddlin' John Carson recorded in 1927 as 'The Smoke Goes Out the Chimney Just the Same'...". I have never heard Carson's version so I don't know how similar the Thomas song is to it, but Calt is either unaware of or completely ignores the great similarity between Thomas's vocal phrasing on "Shanty" and the slide licks on "Guitar Rag", a popular instrumental recorded by black musician Sylvester Weaver in 1923(and itself later copied by white country musicians).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Absolute Gem!!!, January 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Texas Worried Blues (Audio CD)

One of the great pleasures of being a music historian is that I occassionally run across an unheard-of gem. Henry "Ragtime" Thomas is definitely such a gem. Making all of his 23 recordings between 1927 and 1929, Henry Thomas recorded unadulterated music the way musicians really played, not the way that many, like Robert Johnson were told to play. The mix is a cross between Blues, Country, Folk and just plain-old fun music.

Fans of Rock music will recognize some of the songs as later becoming hits. "Don't Ease Me In" was later recorded by the Grateful Dead, "Fishing Blues" was later recorded by the Lovin' Spoonful and "Bulldoze Blues" was later given a note-for-note, (down to the flute solo,)yet uncredited cover treatment by Canned Heat. Thomas played an instrument similar to panpipes that he played on a neckbrace, much in the style that harmonica players use.

If you want to explore the true roots of Rock music or if you are simply a Blues fan, this album is an absolute must.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique Recording, April 22, 2002

By 

Tribe (Toledo, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Texas Worried Blues (Audio CD)

Unique because the music in this collection is really unlike any other. It's certainly not blues, at least not as we know blues, and it's not really old-timey music. From my standpoint, what Henry Thomas was doing was collecting tunes, songs, popular lyrics of the day and combining them all into entertaining tunes for dancing and listening. And saying these tunes are entertaining is an understatement...they are simply some of the prettiest, happiest old-time tunes I've heard. Archaic sounding and fun, this collection is a keyhole look into another musical era. It's likely that old-time country music back in the late 1800s was similar to these. So, not only is this collection a very pleasant-sounding one, but it's also a view to a time before recorded music.