John Hammond
Best of the Vanguard Years
(Vanguard)
Charlie Musselwhite
Best of the Vanguard Years
(Vanguard)
James Cotton
Best of the Vanguard Years
(Vanguard)
Otis Spann
Best of the Vanguard Years
(Vanguard)
Now the white boys come in.
This series was the talk of the office over here, and God knows these people have heard it all, twice. It’s no coincidence that the back cover of each beautifully rendered Vanguard CD layout features the artist in question looking young and powerful, ready to step out of the case: these releases are intent with fully placing you back in the control booth when these masterpieces were cut. Living history, that is, and if last year’s stellar James Cotton and Otis Spann retrospectives weren’t enough, now we have two more reasons to thank the boys over at the big V.
The John Hammond disc traces the evolution of this folk-blues boho demigod from his early attempts at transmitting the blues to interpreting it, and then, finally, to broadcasting his own voice nice and strong. The selection (compiled by Tom Vickers) is superb, and only somewhat chronological, grouping the best-loved Hammond interpretations into three categories: the acoustic field music of his early albums (John Hammond and Country Blues) the electric blues of what was roughly his middle period (Big City Blues, Mirrors, and So Many Roads), and then his late-Seventies maturity (Hot Tracks, Solo).
Not quite the way it went down, but instructive nonetheless, because it shows the basic arc of Hammond’s development, revealing how he was just beginning to find a high, lonesome voice in the folk stuff before the electric stuff nearly derailed him entirely. The two previously unreleased songs are the key, revealing him near fruition, especially on his cover of “Hellhound Blues,” which is far superior to the version he’d release in 1976. By contrast, his middle period, backed even as he was by Charlie Musselwhite and an early version of The Band, merely sounds like a limp retread of the Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters catalogues. Great stuff, no doubt, but nowhere near as exciting as his early promise. Ironically, it was only after he gained respectability among the purists that he seemed to become what they insisted he was all along.
Charlie Musselwhite himself, now, well, he has an instrument to fall back on. That sounds meaner than it should, I guess, but there’s no crime in identifying yourself with your instrument first, especially in the blues idiom. And there was never any question about Musselwhite’s authenticity, even as he made such weird-but-fitting decisions as covering the jazz standard “Christo Redemptor,” now recognized as Charlie’s signature tune.
That’s here, of course, but first we get the background: four hot slices of Chicago-style deep-dish grit from the first album, including his lesser-known experiment, “Cha Cha The Blues,” which is just what you hope it is, and then some. “Redemptor” still stands as a classic instrumental, even if the shuffles from his second album, Stone Blues, almost wipe the memory of it out with sheer force. The next five selections (again, all hand-picked by Vickers) come from the 1969 Tennessee Woman album, and show Charlie working on bringing his vocal talents to the fore, somewhat at the expense of the production and his interpretive skills.
That’s mostly where the Vanguard story ends, although it would have been nice to see more of this maverick’s bolder choices (and one can only wonder why his first recording is buried in the middle of this chronological song cycle). You also get three wonderfully low-fi home recordings from 1994 which somehow manage to sound rawer than his ’60s work. And, oddly, the two reproductions from the Hammond set, the covers of Bo Diddley’s “O Yea!” and Otis Rush’s “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” work better in the context of Charlie’s career than they do John’s. But no one ever said the blues was fair, did they?
