Music Arcades: Various: The Complete Natural Blues

"Featuring the original tracks used on the Moby Album Play," it says on the cover of this 3-CD boxed set. I don't think I'd ever knowingly heard Play until yesterday. Listening on Spotify, some of it was very familiar, and not just because I'd spent a few hours listening to the tracks that Moby sampled. It became part of the ambience a decade ago: Jonathan may have played a bit of it in the office; and it was all over café-bars and ads, back when I watched enough TV to see ads occasionally.

So, an opportunity to flog some cheap back catalogue on the back of a new and widely-heard release. But it wasn't that association that led me to buy the CDs; I think it was just three CDs with enough songs I knew to be good to justify the bargain price, so those I didn't know would be a bonus if they were good too, and an education if they weren't.

The first CD, Natural Blues, is the Play-related one. Then the other two, The Blues Makers — Natural Blues II hint at connections between African music and the Chicago/Delta blues. From the booklet:

There is no such thing… as the "roots" of the blues, but the American blues were a logical development that resulted from specific processes of cultural interaction among to eighteenth- to nineteenth century African descendants in the United States, under certain economic and social conditions. (My emphasis on the non-specific and uncertain bits)

It's all gets very loose and increasingly remote from Moby, but none the worse for that, and there are a couple of small treasures in the collaborations between Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré and between Djeli Moussa Diawara and Bob Brozman. Nowadays you'd have Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara in there as well. Combine those with stone-cold classics like I Would Rather Go Blind and Help Me, and I think I got myself a pretty good deal. These selections have certainly dated much better than Play, which now sounds like a nineties aberration.