Rating: 5/5
Review:
Great stuff
I love these Rough Guides to the various Blues genres and
this one is well up to standard.
Hokum Blues is a term for generally humorous songs, often
based on thinly disguised sexual innuendo.
You know exactly where you are from the start here, with Bo Carter's
Cigarette Blues: "Smoke my cigarette, baby/Draw it all night
long…" The lyrics throughout are
often inventively filthy and often funny as a result, but the music is really
high-quality. There's some superb guitar
work from the likes of Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller and
many more immortals of the Blues, and some outstanding singing, too. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom may lack lyrical
subtlety, but she was an absolute genius of a singer and it shows here. The same can be said of Bessie Smith and
others and it's great stuff from start to finish, including plenty of
well-known greats but also some obscurities which I am very glad to have in my
collection.
The sound is generally very good and even though some
recordings show their age with hiss or rather muddy sound, it's all very
listenable. Frankly, I don't think you
can go wrong with this; it's a terrific compilation.
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