Ma Rainey is one of those foundational figures of African American music who managed to have a tremendous impact despite having a relatively small amount of actual recorded output with a recording career that lasted from 1923 to 1928. She’s often called “Mother of the Blues” because she claimed to have coined the term “the blues” in reference to her songs and the 14 recordings on this CD are almost all “blues” songs in the most archetypal sense, songs about cheating men, miserable women, alcohol abuse and, occasionally, outright murder & suicide. And yet, as we all know about the blues, there’s a cathartic, dramatic satisfaction to these songs and Rainey sings even the darkest tales with an exuberant, bellowing voice that gives these recordings real vibrancy. As with most recordings from the 1920s, it’s a shame the sound quality isn’t better; there’s a lot of scratch and hiss on even the best of these recordings and a couple of them are bad enough that I probably wouldn’t have bothered putting them on this compilation. But most of the recordings are good enough that the music comes across, both the iconic, bluesy melodies and the instrumental flourishes. On some of these, Rainey is accompanied by a full band while on others, she’s backed by just one or two instruments, but the instrumentalists are kind of a “who’s who” of 1920s jazz with Coleman Hawkins showing up on two tracks and Tampa Red doing some of his fantastic slide guitar playing on two tracks where he’s the only instrumentalist. Jimmy Blythe contributes really fantastic piano playing as the only backing musician on Don’t Fish In My Sea. The melodies are catchy and every time I listened to this CD I found myself humming and singing these songs for the next couple of days. Standouts include Shave ‘Em Dry Blues (in a version that’s much cleaner than the more famous version by Lucille Bogan), Stack o’ Lee Blues, Booze & Blues, Blues Oh Blues & Yonder Come the Blues. I did mention this was a blues album, didn’t I? One never knows about revisiting music from this period, nearly a century ago now. Sometimes the sound quality keeps the music from getting through to the listener which is unfortunate since that’s not the fault of the music itself. But with these recordings, I felt the energy, the verve and the drama despite the technological difficulties. The blues endure even from 100 years ago, at least when Ma Rainey was the one singing them. 4 stars.
tl;dr – compilation of songs by the “Mother of the Blues” definitely struggles with sound quality, but the strength of the songs and the performances endure and overcome. 4 stars.