The first blues singers were soloists who accompanied themselves on guitar and later also on piano. The great Muddy Waters had started out as an entertainer on plantations in the South and it was only in Chicago, where he settled in the wake of the great African-American migration to the north, that he turned into a master of the Electric guitar and founded a band. The same is true for piano-wizard Memphis Slim, who often played in a duet with another key musician on the vibrant Chicago scene: bassist and all-round talent Willie Dixon. B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and John Lee Hooker are some of the other top Chicago blues musicians documented on this box-set.
Kansas City enjoyed an exciting scene genre-bending all styles from ragtime, jazz, blues and on to boogie woogie. Here, the first pure blues singers established themselves, such as Jimmy Rushing and Jimmy Witherspoon, who appropriately carried the title "Blues Shouter". Rushing, Jon Hendricks, and Big Miller provide fantastic definitions of the idiom and its story with their early concept albums, which also feature great instrumentalists such as Ben Webster, Zoot Sims, Kenny Burrell, and many others.
Pianist and vocalist Charles Brown began his career in Los Angeles with his remarkably blues-inspired playing. The Texas native also was a huge role model for a certain Ray Charles. How multi-layered and stylistically wide-ranging the blues genre of the 30s to 60s was and how great the singers and musicians that represented it, is aptly documented with the original albums in this collection.
