new CD release on Rounder of historic recordings by Alan Lomax - review from the New York Times
'Alan Lomax Collection': Revelations From a Delta Journey
By TONY SCHERMAN New York Times - [October 17, 1999]
In 1941 and 1942, the folklorist Alan Lomax visited the Mississippi Delta to document its African-American folk music. One of his major objectives was to record the Delta's most famous cultural product, the blues.
"Mississippi the Blues Lineage" (Rounder 11661-1825), whose contents Lomax selected before a stroke incapacitated him several years ago, represents his early-'40s Delta blues fieldwork. It's part of the ambitious "Alan Lomax Collection," whose eventual 140 or more CDs will embrace Lomax's 50-plus-years of worldwide song collecting.
Lomax didn't record the greatest of the Delta blues singers; by 1941, Robert Johnson was three years dead. But Eddie (Son) House, who gives four performances here, was Johnson's teacher, and McKinley Morganfield, who gives two, was Johnson's disciple, later to become world famous as Muddy Waters.
The album includes several other good bluesmen -- David (Honeyboy) Edwards, still performing today at 84, and the otherwise unrecorded William Brown of Memphis -- but to hear these journeymen and then House and Waters is to grasp the difference between competence and mastery.
Not long after these sessions, Muddy Waters left for Chicago, where he pioneered the electric blues band and died in 1983, full of years and renown. On his too-brief appearance here (an album's worth of Waters' Lomax songs, "The Complete Plantation Recordings," is available on MCA), he plays bottleneck guitar with a nimbleness and speed he rarely displayed later on.
Vocally, he is recognizably himself, though without the gravitas of later years. The up-tempo "I Be Bound to Write You" is a version of Waters' early signature tune, "I Be's Troubled" (in Chicago it became "I Can't Be Satisfied"). "You Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone," a slow shuffle, sounds like Robert Johnson's "Come on in My Kitchen," but without Johnson's edge of panic. Even in his mid-20s, Muddy Waters has a reassuring solidity.
The revelation to most listeners will be Son House, whom blues fans know either as a stiff-fingered old man past his prime (he was rediscovered in 1965) or from a half-dozen abysmally recorded 78s made in 1930. When Lomax found House, the singer was 39 and at the top of his form.
While the voices of most Delta bluesmen have a liquid pliancy (except Charley Patton's, which sounds like a buzz saw), House's rings like burnished iron. Although the dominant emotion in his songs is anguish, it sounds somehow involuntary, wrenched from inside. House's three solo performances are worth the price of the CD (and there's more to come: eventually, an entire CD of House's 1941-42 recordings).
But the track that makes this album indispensable is the last one, "Walking Blues," featuring House singing and whaling away on rhythm guitar; Willie Brown on lead guitar (not the William Brown mentioned above but the legendary musician invoked by Robert Johnson -- "tell my friend boy Willie Brown" -- in Johnson's "Crossroads Blues"); Fiddlin' Joe Martin playing lickety-split mandolin runs and yelling encouragement, and Leroy Williams on harmonica.
"Of all my times with the blues, this was the best one," Lomax wrote later, "better than Leadbelly, better than Josh White, Sonny Terry, and all the rest of them."
"Walking Blues" swaggers infectiously, an unamplified portent of the electric blues that would rock post-war America. But post-war America was light years away from the feudal cotton kingdom into which Alan Lomax of Washington came barrelling, armed with a recording machine, immense curiosity and the instinct that led him unerringly -- as it had before and would again -- to several of the most splendid American performers of the century.
