Here's something I wrote a few years ago with albums like this in mind, as well as sites like Ernest Paik's year-long Stephinsources blog:
a celebrity playlist encourages the listener to project the music back onto what they already know about the personality behind it. It promises (faithfully or otherwise) to add some light and colour to what you know about the celebrity's life and thoughts, and these in turn reflect back on the music, making it seem more special. Might the concept of an 'imaginary celebrity playlist' be more interesting than a celebrity playlist?
By 'imaginary celebrity playlist' — perhaps this is obvious — I meant a list that someone had compiled as though they were a particular musical celebrity. The list then becomes a kind of essay or narrative in minimalist list form tracing the influences on the celebrity in question. This CD is one of several "Roots of…" compilations that Catfish Records put out a few years ago (I don't know if they're still going).
My feeling about this one, however, is that it shows the potential laziness of imaginary celebrity playlists. It's not hard to work out the game (ahem, business model) behind this presentation. You acquire some old, out of copyright recordings from the old blues guys that you don't have to pay licence fees for. You know that if you market them as "old recordings from old blues guys" you won't sell many, but if you package them with a connection to someone current with a broader appeal, hey presto, much greater appeal.
I'd really enjoy a compilation that gave a fully rounded picture of all Ry Cooder's roots, including the roots of his many collaborations with Ali Farka Touré, V.M. Bhatt and others. But this isn't it. It's just the old American blues guys. That's not to say that they don't have connections to Cooder, because several of the songs — Guthrie's Vigilante Man, Blind Blake's Diddie Wah Diddie and Leadbelly's Bourgeois Blues and Goodnight Irene — were performed in new versions by him. But these are literal, not imaginative, associations.
And I already know the Guthrie and Leadbelly numbers, as well as some Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt. The discovery for me was Washington Phillips, accompanying himself on a stringed instrument that, it seems, no one can definitively identify.
Well, we've made it two years now, since the first album, with a post every day, covering nearly 730 releases (allowing for No Music Day. There's still quite a way to go.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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