Tommy Johnson - Complete Recorded Works 1928-29 - Blues - CD

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 it's most agonised exponent. But there is no doubt that the music of Tommy Johnson epitomised the Mississippi Blues at it's most expressive and poetic. Johnson achieved the perfection of a regional vocal and instrumental tradition, while realising it's 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