Smithsonian Folkways - Classic Piedmont Blues

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent compilation

Needless to say, this is excellent.  It's another in a virually flawless series by Smithsonian Folkways, this time of blues from Piedmont, the foothills of the Appalachians.  It's a wonderful, varied tradition with some very well known exponents like Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Doc Watson, but even the obscure stuff here is quite brilliant.  This is knowledgeably chosen, well recorded and hugely enjoyable; no one  who is interested in the blues or in superb acoustic guitar playing could possibly be disappointed in this compilation.

As there is no track list on the product page (yet) I have added the list below.

1          Truckin' Little Baby - John Jackson

2          Maime  - John Cephas / Phil Wiggins

3          Hey Bartender, There's a Big bug in My Beer - Eddie Pennington / Warner Williams

4          Confusion - Brownie McGhee / Sonny Terry

5          T.B. Blues - Josh White

6          If I Could Holler Like a Mountain Jack - Baby Tate

7          Clog Dance - Hobart Smith

8          Daisy - Brownie McGhee

9          Going Down the Road Feeling Bad - Elizabeth Cotten

10        I Got a Woman 'Cross Town - Pink Anderson

11        Red River Blues - John Jackson

12        I Ain't Gonna Pick No More Cotton - Jay Summerour / Warner Williams

13        Sweet Woman - Brownie McGhee / Sonny Terry

14        The Train That Carried My Girl From Town - Doc Watson

15        Mountain Jack - Blind Gary Davis

16        Crow Jane - John Cephas / Phil Wiggins

17        Fore Day Creep - Brownie McGhee

18        Sittin' on Top of the World - Roscoe Holcomb

19        Meet Me in the Bottom - Pink Anderson

20        Dirty Mistreater - J.C. Burris / Brownie McGhee / Sonny Terry

21        The Road Is Rough and Rocky - Archie Edwards

Jeremy Spencer - Homebrewed Blues

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Pleasant but uninspiring

I have been a fan of Jeremy Spencer's work for getting on for 50 years now.  He and Peter Green created some classic tracks with Fleetwood Mac and Spencer is a very fine blues guitarist.  Sadly, I don't think Homebrewed Blues really reflects that.

These are all instrumentals featuring varying blues styles including the bottleneck with which he thrilled me all those years ago.  It is, of course, very well played and perfectly listenable, but there is no fire in it and it doesn't have any of that edge which blues needs to really speak to me.  It's a sort of Easy Listening Blues which is pleasant and inoffensive, but doesn't really add up to much.

I'm sorry to be critical of a musician I have admired for most of my life.  There's nothing actively wrong with the album but it's pretty forgettable, I'm afraid.

Gerry Goffin & Carole King - Will You Love Me Tomorrow

Rating: 4/5

Review: 

A good compilation

This is a good compilation of songs by two of the greatest songwriters of the 607s and 70s.  The Goffin/King partnership produced some fantastic songs, several of which feature here, although not all of these were written by Goffin and King in partnership.  It has to be said, too, that their Tin Pan Alley days also produced some pretty ordinary stuff.  None of it's actively bad, but a few tracks, like Walkin' With My Angel, Her Royal Majesty or Follow That Girl, for example, are undistinguished, to say the least. 

Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable collection with some familiar songs, not necessarily in the versions which made them famous but all well done.  Some of the unfamiliar stuff is very enjoyable, too – like Everybody's Got A Dance But Me, which even sends up their own Loco-motion along with other dance records.  The sound is as good as one can expect from recordings of this period, and I can recommend this disc.

Here s a full track list:

1 Brenda Lee - Will You Love Me Tomorrow

2 The Drifters - Up On The Roof

3 The Crickets - Little Hollywood Girl

4 The Vernons Girls - The Loco-motion

5 The Shirelles - What A Sweet Thing That Was

6 Everly Brothers - How Can I Meet Her

7 Little Eva - He Is The Boy

8 Curtis Lee - Just Another Fool

9 Carole King - School Bells Are Ringing

10 Bobby Vee - Walkin' With My Angel

11 Bertell Dache - All The World Loves A Lover

12 The Ronettes - You Bet I Would

13 Big Dee Irwin - Everybody's Got A Dance But Me

14 Vinnie Monte - Follow That Girl

15 The Crystals - He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)

16 Tony Orlando - Am I The Guy?

17 Gene McDaniels - Point Of No Return

18 Jackie DeShannon - Heaven Is Being With you

19 Billy Fury - Halfway To Paradise

20 James Darren - Her Royal Majesty

21 Ben E. King - Show Me The Way

22 Bobby Vee - How Many Tears

23 The Cookies - Chains

24 Dion - Take Good Care Of My Baby

25 Ann Campbell - Bobby, Bobby, Bobby

26 Shelley Fabares - Hey Funny Face

27 Carole King - Nobody's Perfect

28 Gene Pitney - Every Breath I Take

29 The Viscounts - Who Put The Bomp (In The Bomp Bomp Bomp)

30 The Drifters - When My Little Girl Is Smiling

Paul Simon - Complete Unplugged

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good but flawed

This is a pretty good issue, but it does have its problems.

The good bits scarcely need saying: it's Paul Simon live, and as he's one of the very greatest of songwriters and a very fine performer, both the material and the performances are very good indeed.  I'm not bonkers about some of these arrangements (including Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I really don’t like here) but that's just my personal taste and most of them are terrific.

What's not so good is the "Complete" aspect of the album.  These are largely unedited recordings, so we get a full minute and a half of applause at the start, for example which, on repeated listening, gets very annoying.  I also think that quite a lot else should have been edited out; do we really need to hear Paul asking the engineer to sort out the sound for several minutes, or all the abandoned takes – some of which were abandoned for very good reasons?  It's moderately interesting once, but on an album to be listened to again and again it won't do.

So…I'd say this is worth getting, especially for long, long-term Paul Simon fans like me, but you do have to negotiate some very irritating stuff to get to the good bits.  The old cliché that it would have made a much better single album definitely applies here and the very poor editing decisions mean that I can only give this a qualified recommendation.