Leroy Carr was arguably the most popular blues recording star of his era (1928-35) and by some accounts the most influential among other bluesmen as well. Although latter-day blues audiences came to prefer Delta and [...]

Founder of the Delta Blues -- Charley Patton (Yazoo, 1970) 'Charlie [sic] Patton was the most powerful blues recording of artist of all time, as well as the most subtle,' wrote Stephen Calt in the [...]

Few bodies of blues recordings have been as influential as Albert King's 1966-67 output at Stax Records, on singles and on the Born Under a Bad sign album. The LP collected songs from his first [...]

Elmore James' incomparable blues recordings continue to be endlessly recycled, and any number of his albums on a myriad of labels could be considered of Blues Hall of Fame quality. But the British compilation The [...]

Columbia's first King of the Delta Blues Singers compilation was a vehicle for the discovery of Robert Johnson by a new audience in 1961. By the time the second volume was released in 1970, Johnson [...]

Columbia's 1961 compilation of Robert Johnson's 1936-37 recordings was not a best seller, unlike the boxed set that created a frenzy nearly 30 years later, but it was arguably the single most important blues reissue [...]

While many of the great blues recordings have been commercial hits, there are others that sank almost without a trace. Skip James' Paramount singles, for instance -- nine of them, all recorded in 1931, after [...]

Cut from the same cloth as Wells' classic Hoodoo Man Blues LP from the same period, It's My Life, Baby! captured the Junior Wells-Buddy Guy team in great form, both in the studio and live [...]

This boxed set bears Willie Dixon’s name and photo on the front, but it is actually a collection of performances by 13 different Chess/Checker artists recorded between 1951 and 1969. The unifying theme is that [...]

Father of the Folk Blues, one of the key albums of the folk-blues revival, helped introduced the deepest of the Delta blues singers to a new generation of listeners in the 1960s. House had just [...]