Somewhere, about six weeks ago, I saw a reference to a book with what seemed like a promising premise: The Best Of The Blues, subtitled The 101 Essential Albums. Now, I love lists of almost any type. When I see online a teaser for an article titled “The 14 Cities To Avoid In The South,” I’m in, even though I’m not heading to the South anytime soon (though a few places in that region remain on my bucket list). Lists, especially when they’re accompanied by competent commentary, are generally great reading.
I checked the catalog of our local multi-county library system, but the book wasn’t listed. So I clicked to the inter-library loan catalog, and there it was, in the collection of the Hennepin County Library. (Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most-populous and is basically Minneapolis and its surrounding suburbs to the north, south, and west.) A few weeks later, the book, written by blues historian Robert Santelli and published in 1997, showed up in St. Cloud.
I haven’t read all of it yet. In fact, I’ve barely started, puttering along in the brief essay on the No. 3 album, The Best Of Little Walter, a 1958 release on the Chess label. I have that one on both the LP and CD shelves.
As to the book’s No. 1 and No. 2 albums, I’m covered there, too: No. 2 was a mid-Fifties collections of Muddy Waters’ first singles, and I have a three-CD collection of the man’s work as well as seven individual CDs and eight individual LPs (there’s some overlap between the CDs and LPs), so even if I don’t have the specific collection cited, I’m good to go.
And I have the No. 1 album in two formats, as well. It’s the 1990 release of Robert Johnson’s work, The Complete Recordings. The original release, on three LPs or two CDs, came in an LP-sized box and included a large booklet with some essays. A two-disc set, CD-size, came out in 2011 with new essays, timed to mark the centennial of Johnson’s birth. I have the LP version of the 1990 release, and I have the 2011 CD set.
I’m tempted to look ahead, to see how many of the 101 albums – or their equivalents – I have on the shelf. A lot, I’m sure. And many of them came courtesy of a kind clerk at a Salvation Army thrift store in south Minneapolis, where I did some occasional record digging. She called me one Saturday morning in December 1998.
“You asked me to call you if anyone ever dropped off a lot of records at one time,” she said. “Well, someone just brought in what looks like about twenty boxes. You might want to get over here.”
I poured my coffee in the sink, bundled up, got my bike from the basement storage unit and headed down Pleasant Avenue and over to Nicollet. There were in fact twenty boxes of records on the floor near the front of the store, and another gentleman was already digging in them. I sat on the floor at the far end of the cluster of boxes from him and started digging, too.
My guess is that whoever owned the collection had died, and in these days of the CD, his or her relatives had no idea what to do with the records. Whoever had owned these records was almost certainly an audiophile who would buy a record, tape it and then put the record back in the jacket and leave it there. How do I know? Because every one of the inside sleeves was upright, not on its side to allow easy access to the record. And every one of those records had the sheen of newness, a look that’s hard to describe but easy to see.
I began to dig. There were records from the 1950s and early 1960s by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. I found Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Willie Johnson. Albert King and Leadbelly. John Lee Hooker and Etta James. Anthology after anthology of Chicago blues, country blues, Delta blues. And the five double albums Columbia put out in the early 1970s: The complete recordings of Bessie Smith, in pristine condition.
In addition, there were – relatively – more current records: stuff by the Allman Brothers Band, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and more. I already had those records on the shelves at home, but I grabbed them anyway. I had a plan.
The other gentleman and I crossed paths midway through the cluster of boxes. We nodded, each of us looking as casually as we could at what the other was carrying. I saw a few things in his pile that it would have been nice to have gotten to first; I assume he saw the same in my pile.
By the time I made my way through the boxes, I had fifty albums. At fifty cents apiece, that was $25, and – times were a bit rough back then – that was about the limit of what I could spend that day. I double-bagged the records for their ride in my bike’s saddlebag baskets, thanked the manager profusely for calling me and headed home.
There, I sorted through the records, setting aside those that were new to me and noting those that duplicated albums already on my shelves. After lunch, I began comparing those duplicates with the copies I already had. After keeping the best copies for myself, I put the duplicates in bags and headed out to two of my favorite record stores.
I sold those twelve duplicate albums – including my previous copies of the Bessie Smith recordings – for about $50. So I ended up with thirty-eight new albums – the vast majority of them classic blues – and a profit of about $25.
For the next year or so, I added LPs occasionally to the blues shelf, and after I got my first CD player, I began to build a blues collection in that format. My best estimate is that I have about 120 blues LPs and maybe 45 individual CDs along with seven or eight CD box sets of blues. I would guess that as I wander through The Best Of The Blues, I’ll be familiar with maybe eighty of those 101 albums.
And I’ll likely think about acquiring the ones I don’t know.
As I wrote this, I was wondering what blues song was the first I ever heard. It was likely Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain,” covered brilliantly by the Rolling Stones for their 1970 live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (The Stones’ studio version of the song, found on 1969’s Let It Bleed, is very good, too.) And there are about eight other versions of the tune on my digital shelves,
But we’ll go back to the beginning today. Johnson recorded two takes of “Love In Vain” on June 20, 1937, in a makeshift studio in downtown Dallas. The second take was released on the Vocalion label. Here it is:
– whiteray
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