Music Arcades: Various: The Story of the Blues

No, nothing to do with Pete 'one song' Wylie. Here's another one I forgot I had. Sometimes it's the most recent purchases that I forget most quickly: those last days when I realised I was supersaturated with new music and couldn't absorb any more. I picked this one up in summer 2005, knowing that I already had quite a few blues comps (1, 2, though not yet 3) but reasoning that the overlap would not be complete. Anyway, 42 songs for a fiver: never mind the quality, feel the value for money!

I was going to make a small-minded point along the lines of, "It's just a playlist, organised mostly chronologically with just a soupçon of geography, with no 'story' in evidence," when my web search, together with the shrewd step of glancing at the sleeve notes for the first time, revealed that The Story of the Blues was originally released in 1969 as a companion to Paul Oliver's book of the same title.

This extended version for CD substitutes hits like Mannish Boy and Willie Dixon's You Shook Me for a few of the original songs, and then adds a kind of post-1969 postscript in the shape of recent blues practice by the likes of Taj Mahal, Janis Joplin, Santana, some fella called Dylan (a shrewd selection from Love and Theft), and, rather pleasingly, Little Axe (the nom de disque of Skip McDonald), who, some argue, laid the ground for Moby's Play album.

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The sleeve notes, written by Paul Oliver himself (whose day job was as an archictural historian), turn out to be pretty interesting — making me think I'd get a lot more out of the album if I had Oliver's book. There are quite a few books about the early blues traditions, though — from Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, which I've read, to Nick Tosches' Country, which I haven't, via Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, which I only just stumbled on when I was trying to remember Tosches's name. Together they create this mythology of the rural southern states in the early decades of the 20th century, as a crucible where the groove of Africa was fused with the Anglo-Celt ballad tradition, under conditions that owed more to historical accident than any design. It's getting to be so oft-repeated that pretty soon now, it's going to be accepted as fact, if it isn't already.