Various Artists
Peabody Blues
St. Charles Blues
Jackson Stomp
Nehi Records 1, 2 & 3

www.nehirecords.com
 

Though there are plenty of crossovers and cross polinizations on these three vintage collections, two have local focuses. Peabody Blues offers 26 tracks by ten acts recorded Sept. 22-25, 1929, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis for release on the Brunswick and Vocalion labels. Demonstrating that recording of the blues didn’t grind to a total halt during the Great Depression, St. Charles Blues‘s 28 cuts by five acts come from a single-day marathon for Bluebird Records at New Orleans’s St. Charles Hotel. (The well-illustrated, usually excellent liner notes inadvertently place the session on both August 15 and October 15, 1936. RCA’s 1997 reissue Four Women Blues gives the October date.) The title Jackson Stomp refers to mandolinist/guitarist/singer Charlie McCoy’s birthplace, Jackson, MS. Here he plays either lead (under various names) or backup on 26 tracks done in assorted cities for various labels reaching from 1928 to 1941,

Memphis was a musical melting pot. Peabody Blues opens with Furry Lewis’s folk blues “John Henry” (one of the CD’s four songs that were originally stretched out to fill both sides of a 78 RPM platter). Boogie-woogie pianist Speckled Red does his playfully insulting “The Dirty Dozens.” Prone to reusing lines and melodies, Robert Wilkins (later known as Rev. Robert Wilkins) on “That’s No Way To Get Along” shows vestiges of his song the Rolling Stones did as “Prodigal Son.” In a searingly candid view into his mindset, on “Falling Down Blues” he sings, “I’d certainly treat you just like you was white. If that don’t satisfy you, girl, I’ll take your life.”

It would be decades before Lewis recorded again. He closed his session here in nightmarish comedy with “Creeper’s Blues.” As the notes say, “Furry watches the bugs around his bed play baseball and then proceed to steal his pillow and threaten him with a shotgun before stealing his wallet.”

Loaded with low-down joie de vivre, the St. Charles Blues sessions were arranged by the Mississippi Sheiks’ Bo Carter (born Armenter Chatman into the noted musical Chatman family). Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of restrictions on lyrics so we find plenty of Carter’s risque hokum songs (“Pussy Cat Blues,” “Don’t Mash My Digger So Deep”) as well as good-time songs his family developed to earn money from white audiences. Besides 15 Carter and Chatman Brothers cuts, we find tracks by Robert Hill, Sonny Boy Nelson and Nelson’s singing wife known as Mississippi Matilda (who wasn’t an outstanding vocalist).

The farthest-reaching of the three CDs, Jackson Stomp includes (besides Charlie McCoy) Tommy Johnson (who became a character in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?), McCoy’s brother Joe McCoy (known as Kansas Joe) and the first Sonny Boy Williamson. On the single track from Joe’s wife Memphis Minnie (one of the earliest noted female guitarists), her composition “Long as I Can See You Smile” almost sounds like a pop standard. There’s also one number, “Lead Pencil Blues (It Just Won’t Write),” from Johnnie (Geechie) Temple with Charlie on second guitar. Is Temple playing a bluesman whose writer’s block is keeping his creative juices from flowing?

Given that the CDs are compiled from collectors’ 78s, their audio quality is usually as good as could be expected.

And where did the record label name Nehi originate? Pronounced “knee-high,” it was a soft drink introduced in 1924 that bluesmen and their listeners used to soften the taste of home brew.

— Bruce Sylvester