Bessie Smith, Saint Louis Blues (78rpm Version). The Essential Bessie Smith. Legacy, 64922, 1997.
This is Bessie Smith at her most powerful and profitable. “Saint Louis Blues” is not only one among the first blues records labeled as such, but also an example of the creative space in which blues works (and the creative distance blues has traveled). This song is one of an active female voice, echoing from the stages of the vaudeville circuit rather than from the cotton fields of an agrarian illusion. In the end, Bessie Smith is the queen of the blues, its originator and inspiration, and so this song is selected mostly by way of correcting the notion that the first blues were not made for performance. Listen for horns, jazz stylings, and the soaring power of the singing: this music is not rural and yet is one of the first blues. In other words, this music is of the genre precisely for its working against the genre, for its ability to draw on the outside influence in popular jazz and yet remain true to itself—all of which are not often considered qualities of roots music.
Charley Patton, Stone Pony Blues. Charley Patton Volume 3. Document, 5011, 1990.
Charley Patton is an exponent of the sort of blues which the playlist takes as its identity: not because what he sings is so different from the male, regional, roots music stereotype, but because even as such his songs are daring in their creative control. What Charley Patton did best, in fact, was take this control away from the fact of tradition and into his own hands; the sexual innuendo here is crackling and fresh, inspired almost surely by an audience. His experimental take on guitar patterns, straying ever so slightly away from 12 bars per verse, shows that the blues built on itself before other music built on the blues. Charley Patton changed the musical life: his songs reinvent what blues means and what being an artist who works with the blues can entail.
