When folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson in 1947 in New York City, the results were so controversial that he waited a decade to release the album Blues in the Mississippi Night and even then disguised the identity of the artists and the location of the session. The three bluesmen — dubbed Natchez, Leroy, and Sib in the original album notes –did more than play the blues on the album; they defined it in candid conversation, relaying such wrenching tales of hardships and racial injustice that, according to Lomax, they feared that a release of the recording might bring reprisals against them. Lomax had worries, too, when his activities came under question, and during the McCarthy era he moved to England. The first incarnation of Blues in the Mississippi Night was as a Lomax BBC radio program in 1951. The initial LP release, which included an acapella track by Vera Hall and some prison work songs, was also in England on the Nixa label in 1957. It was finally released in the U.S. by United Artists in 1959, after Lomax had returned home, but not until the blues artists had all passed away were their real names revealed on expanded CD versions by Rykodisc (1990) and Rounder (2003). Despite the album’s title and subtitle (The Real Story of the Blues Sung and Told by Three Mississippi Delta Blues Men), the prisoners from the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman were the only performers on the album who were actually from Mississippi.
