Customer Reviews

When the Sun Goes Down 1: Walk Right In

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outstanding engineering for old recordings for modern ears.
the problem with old recordings has always been the poor sound.
you wont hear any old recordings(1920's and 1930's) that sound better than this!

This first item in Bluebird's "When The Sun Goes Down" series, "Walk Right In", collects 79 minutes worth of blues and blues-related material from the RCA Victor label.
Opening with Robert Petway's 1941 single "Catfish Blues", it includes the original versions of often re-recorded songs like "Baby Please Don't Go", "The Midnight Special" and "Walk Right In", as well as an unusual but very interesting choir performance of "St Louis Blues".

The sound is generally very good considering that all of these songs were committed to tape between 1927 and 1941...most of them actually between '27 and '34. Huddie Ledbetter is here, doing "Ham An' Eggs" and the aforementioned "Midnight Special"; Big Bill Broonzy performs the swinging "Mississippi River Blues", and other highlights include "Walk Right In", "Catfish Blues", little-known singer/guitarist Frank Crumit's rather urban version of "Frankie And Johnny", Trixie Butler's jazzy "Just A Good Woman Through With The Blues", and of course Delta legend Tommy Johnson's eerie, masterful "Cool Drink Of Water Blues" from 1928.

There are four volumes in this series, available individually or as a box set, plus six volumes dedicated to individual artists (like Blind Willie McTell, Arthur Crudup, and Leadbelly, whose entry is one of the very best), and an eleventh volume of gospel music titled "Sacred Roots Of The Blues".
The entire series is subtitled "The Secret History Of Rock 'n' Roll", and while not everything here is straight-ahead twelve-bar blues, everything has the feeling of the blues.
Casual listeners may well feel that this is too far from Muddy Waters and B.B. King for their liking, but this musically quite varied and rather well annotated disc, and indeed the entire series, is recommended to everyone and anyone who is interested is American roots music. And vol. 2, 3 and 4 only get bluesier!

In the course of the past year or so I have highlighted any number of blues CD compilations as I have tried to search for the roots of the American musical experience, and in the process retraced some of the nodal points of my own musical interests. I never tire of saying that I have be formed, and reformed by the blues so that when I came upon this "When The Sun Goes Down" series (a very apt expression of the right time of the blues) I grabbed each copy with both hands. In one series, the producers, as an act of love without question, have gathered up the obscure, the forgotten, the almost forgotten and the never to be forgotten voices that "spoke" to me in my youth and started me on that long ago love affair with the blues. I have hardly been alone on that journey but it is nice to see that some people with the resources, the time, money and energy have seen fit to honor our common past. Each CD reviewed here, and any future ones that I can get my hands on for there are more than the three I am reviewing today, is chock full of memorable performances by artists who now will, through the marvels of modern high technology, gain a measure of justified immortality.

Here is the cream. As always "Big Joe" Williams holds forth on "Baby, Please Don't Go". The only question is how many strings does the guitar that he is using on this track have. I know it isn't six. That's too easy. No anthology of the country blues is complete with a Lead Belly song. Although he has never been on the top of my country blues list here his "Ham an' Eggs" and, of course, the jumping "Midnight Special" are well done. Hey, I only said he wasn't only MY A-list not that he wasn't a great and worthy blues legend. Big Bill Broonzy is definitely on my A-list and he shows off here with "Mississippi River Blues". A real treat in this compilation is the inclusion of Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies doing "Garbage Man Blues" Why? Well, at one time, before his early death in an automobile accident, he was a real challenger to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys for the title of `King of Western Swing". Moreover, unlike my questioning the placement of yodeler Jimmy Rodgers as a blues man (in another CD in this series) Milton Brown fits right in here.

All hail Bukka White. I have been raving about my relatively recent "discovery" of Brother White every since I saw him on a Stephan Grossman DVD musical documentary that also included Son House. Old Bukka blew that well-respected and seminal figure in country blues away. Here Bukka holds forth on the old railroad blues tune "The Panama Limited", a song that I first heard way back when covered by folk revivalist Tom Rush on one of his early albums. Tommy Johnson, as on a previous CD in this series stands out with "Cold Drink Of Water Blues". No wonder blues woman Rory Block, a key figure in the modern "discovery" of his work, chose to cover this classic.

Two exceptional treats here are the incomparable Paul Robeson reaching down for "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child". Nothing I could say here would give an adequate expression to the voice of Brother Robeson. We may have been political opponents but when the deal went down he could sings circles around anyone else, especially with his primordial emotive powers. All I can say is that you have to hear this one. The other treat is a genuine piece of black cultural history, the weaving of politics and religion that, in a pre-Obama age (and maybe even then) drove one aspect of black musical expression. Here we have the Reverend J.M. Gates doing "Somebody's Been Stealin'" (along with some members of his congregation). If you want to hear what bluesman Blind Willie Johnson and, let's say, a black politician like Adam Clayton Powell fed off of in order to learn to "speak' in the cadence of the black masses in the first third of the 20th century listen up.

the sound is amazing. I have never heard Tommy Johnson's "Cool Drink of Water Blues" sound this good. I can hear nuances in his voice that I've never heard before. It's like a new recording. Unbelievable. I'm definately going to check out the other three titles in this series.

I'm not an audiophile, but I found the sound quality on this CD amazing. Soulful, trance-inducing, 100% real music.

I've been listening to blues recordings for 40 years, and this CD has some excellent things I had never heard before. The sound quality is amazing, considering the age of some of these tracks.

The packaging is for crap, but the sound is amazing. I have never heard Tommy Johnson's "Cool Drink of Water Blues" sound this good. I can hear nuances in his voice that I've never heard before. It's like a new recording. Unbelievable. I'm definately going to check out the other three titles in this series.