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About Complete Recorded Works 1928-29
Amazon.com Evidence of the strange genius of Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson is limited to 17 recordings from two late-1920s sessions. It is the first of these, for the Victor Company, that produced the recordings upon which Johnson's lofty reputation rests. Sung in a husky falsetto, somewhere between an African field holler and an Alpine yodel, "Cool Drink of Water Blues" stands atop a pinnacle in the richly inventive Delta blues tradition with younger cousin Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail" and Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman." "Canned Heat Blues" is a bittersweet paean to the older Johnson's penchant for imbibing tins of jellied kerosene, and was a modest hit in that era's "race record" market. Also notable from his 1928 session were the influential "Maggie Campbell Blues," "Big Road Blues," and "Big Fat Mama Blues," while the recently discovered Paramount session was remarkable for "Slidin' Delta" and "I Wonder to Myself." --Alan Greenberg Product Description Charley Patton is often considered to be the father of the Mississippi Blues, and the young, ill-fated Robert Johnson epitomised the Mississippi Blues as its most agonised exponent. But there is no doubt that the music of Tommy Johnson epitomised the Mississippi Blues at its most expressive and poetic. Johnson achieved the perfection of a regional vocal and instrumental tradition, while realising its potential for the development of a unique and personal means of communication. The Mississippi Delta is a wedge-shaped, fertile, black lands region between the Yazoo and the Mississippi Rivers. Near Drew, the heart of the Delta, where so many blues singers lived, Tommy Johnson apparently met up with the celebrated Charley Patton, and the encounter helped shape his career. In the main, Tommy Johnson used traditional verses, remodeling them to suit the overall theme of blues. But 'Canned Heat' was a notable exception, a song about his addiction to crude alcohol. In a later session, on which his friend Ishman Bracey accompanied him on a couple of titles, he was less well served by the infamous recording quality of the Paramount company. But the quality of his blues was unimpaired on Slidin' Delta, and I Wonder hints at the humour for which he was known among his friends. Perhaps the most extraordinary story in this documentation of a remarkable blues talent is the discovery, sixty years after it was made, of the sole known copy of his coupling Riding Horse and Alcohol and Jake Blues. A version of Maggie Campbell the former is much impaired, but on the latter, which is adapted from CANNED HEAT, we can hear Tommy Johnson fresh and relaxed, and at the height of his abilities. He lived on, unrecorded, for a quarter of a century; much addicted, but much admired and much copied by those who knew him.
