Someone please explain to me why, after all these years, Rory Block has never played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival?

Nobody recreates the traditional Mississippi Delta Blues better than this woman does.

She’s a monster on the guitar (interestingly playing with the slide on her third finger and not her pinky) and sings these songs like she lived them.

This is the fifth recording in her “Mentor Series,” having previously tackled the repertoire of Delta legends Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Reverend Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. (Surely Block is dusting off her Paramount 78s for future Bukka White, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson tributes.)

The Skip James tribute is obviously a special endeavor for Block as she visited him as a teenager just before he passed in 1969. James’ signature composition “I’m So Glad” is beautifully recreated here, a song some might recall being turned into a hit by Cream.

Other known-by-a-few James classics Block revives here are “Special Rider Blues,” “Devil Got My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.”

She even opens the disc with a heartfelt personal tribute “Nehemiah James” that she plays in James’s distinct guitar style.

Granted, you have to have an extremely eclectic taste to appreciate Delta blues. (Back in the old country, a buddy of mine who, when he wanted a guest to leave his house, slapped a Delta blues reissue LP on the hi-fi and the living room would empty pronto.)

But this music has passion. It was created in an era, and area, of oppression none of us can ever fathom. Block translates the passion and pain admirably.

Great all-around release.