Zane Daly
Hi. Thanks for holding. In 1997 I will be reviewing several record labels which have been issuing high quality recordings, most of them obscure or too new to be understood, as a sort of "survey" service. Column number one will look at a group of excellent traditional music revivals from Yazoo Records.
Yazoo was an independent, blues-based label in the 1970's, the first label to reissue very rare early country blues albums by legendary musicians such as Son House, Papa Charlie Jackson, Robert Wilkins, the Memphis Jug Band, Scrapper Blackwell, and dozens more. Many featured outrageously gorgeous album covers by R. Crumb and Robert Armstrong, and were true collector's items. In many cases the music had not been available for half a century.
Shanachie Records purchased Yazoo's catalog in the late 1980's and not much happened for a while, pending a few CD reissues. Eventually most of the blues catalog was reissued with improved noise-reduction, turning many previously "murky" "muddy" "scratchy" or otherwise unlistenable recordings into near-pristine sounding albums. Yazoo also began reissuing its small but excellent early gospel and black string band recordings.
1996 was a fabulous year for Yazoo reissues, as the following mini-reviews will show.
Before The Blues (Vols. 1,2,3) presents turn of the century african american music in an outstanding three-volume series, featuring not only guitar and harmonica blues music, but gospel singing and preaching, string bands and jug bands, and some early popular songs. There are over sixty tunes from such well-known musicians as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Memphis Minnie, Mississippi John Hurt and Cow Cow Davenport to such utter unknowns as Eck Robertson, The Tennessee Chocolate Drops, Hattie Hudson, Moses Mason, and Little Hat Jones.
If you like harmonica blues you'll like Harmonica Masters which features DeFord Bailey, Jaybird Coleman, Gwen Foster, Freeman Stowers, Six-Cylinder Smith, and eighteen more solo players, jug band players, and string band players. Yet another early blues CD is The Roots Of Rap which features blues and gospel shouting, and some call and response blues duets by the Allen Brothers, Kansas City Kitty & Georgia Tom, the Memphis Jug Band, Pinetop Smith, and Seven Foot Dilly & His Dill Pickles, plus many more, leaning towards the risque and hokum side of the blues.
A few years ago Yazoo released a vinyl anthology called When I Was A Cowboy (Vols. 1 & 2) which rescued the first recordings of 19th century cowboys who were either singing traditional ballads, or reciting tales. The idea has been expanded into two CD's with four times as many songs. There are a few well-known singers such as Ken Maynard, Buell Kazee, and the Delmore Brothers, but most are either lost performers from the turn of the century or were actual "cowboys" who happened to sing and play the guitar. This is not country & western music, and is about as traditional as traditional can get.
There have been several anthologies of Madagascar music in the last few years, so a good variation on the theme is Music of Madagascar: The 1930's, which features twenty very rare recordings of popular music from that period. There are courtship songs, songs of praise, comic songs, on such instruments as the fiddle, the valiha (harp) and various flutes, piccolos, and guitars.
And if you are interested at all in the recorded development of "world music" I feel that the Secret Museum of Mankind series is the best one available. I picked volumes one and two as the best records of 1995. Volumes three and four are just as good. The "Secret Museum" has focused on the period from 1900 - 1940, when American, French, and English record companies went on a global recording spree. Their mission no doubt was to make money, but what they did was to document thousands of traditional musicians from around the world, often the last of the 19th century survivors, and the last "pre-technology" generation to perform tribal, ritual, or village music. Volume three goes everywhere, from Albania to Samarkand, to Tuscany, Nyasaland, Laos, Angola, Persia, and the Navajo reservation. Volume four is an Asian sampler, with music from Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, and other even murkier central Asian origins.
Yazoo is still on a roll. More early blues, jazz, string band, and gospel CDs have been issued, and I hope the "Secret Museum" series continues. All of these recordings have one thing in common, they don't sound commercial. You seldom get a sense anymore that you're listening to musicians who just happen to play music, on a front porch, at a village wedding, outside the old yurt or juke joint, and that the music would be the same whether someone was there with a tape recorder to catch it or not.