This 48-minute, 12-song, five-artist showcase for Louisiana’s finest bluesmen first appeared in 1970, and despite its absence from the standard classic-blues discographies compiled in the past 27 years, it’s as bristly a collection of lowdown electric blues as one will find. Recorded in one day at Capitol City Sound in Baton Rouge, it suffers from neither premeditation nor fastidiousness and proves that Chicago and the Mississippi Delta weren’t the only regions hospitable to America’s most enduring musical style save jazz.

With the exception of the pianist Henry Gray – whose longtime stint with Howlin’ Wolf has guaranteed him a modicum of renown – these performers had no reputations to uphold, but that alone didn’t guarantee that they’d make their stoicism sound relaxed enough to feel lived in. Yet that’s exactly how Arthur “Guitar” Kelley sounds as he sings, “You know the blues ain’t nothin’ but a woman in love with a married man. / She can’t be with him when she wanna, she got to be with him when she can” (backdoor woman, anyone?) and how Moses “Whispering” Smith sounds as he sings in , “I love you, baby, / yeah, I love you from behind” (backdoor man?).

And even when Gray and Co. weren’t slipping comfortably in and out of down-home truths, they were slipping so comfortably in and out of their music that it often seemed to be playing them instead of the other way around. More self-possessed than even the instrumental interplay, however, was the singing, with Clarence Edwards’ hell-hounded turn on “Hear That Rumbling” a special thrill. As for those local-color freaks who wonder what, other than the musicians’ birthplaces, makes this music particularly Louisianian, the title of Silas Hogan’s definitive (and perennially accurate) “Rats and Roaches in My Kitchen” says it all.

–Arsenio Orteza