Alabama: Black Country Dance Bands - Complete Recorded Works (1924-1949) CD

Document's Alabama: Black Country Dance Bands (1924-1949) collects the recorded work of Mississippi Sarah and Daddy Stovepipe, Bogus Blind Ben Covington, and the Mobile Strugglers, together constituting a mixed bag of primarily vaudeville and dance-oriented pieces. While Daddy Stovepipe's four recordings for the Gennett label, made in 1924 and 1927, are relatively uninteresting and characterized by bad sound quality. His later eight sides with wife Mississippi Sarah are among the best jug band breakdowns on record, encompassing themes from the Bible to the Depression in consistently magnificent style. In "Burleskin' Blues" and the glorious "The Spasm," Sarah and Stovepipe are at their liveliest, funniest, and raunchiest, swapping insults and threats, Stovepipe rapping his rhymes against the pounding rhythm of his wife's jug, and Sarah wailing her blues to her husband's screaming harmonica. Bogus Blind Ben Covington ("Bogus" because he wasn't actually blind) was probably a pseudonym for Ben Curry, a banjo player and medicine show entertainer whose repertoire consisted of such comic pieces as "I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop." His performances are typically less captivating than those of Mississippi Sarah and Daddy Stovepipe, but are at times very amusing and always valuable as provocative glimpses into the songster tradition. The two tracks by the Mobile Strugglers, recorded over ten years after the last pieces by either Covington or Stovepipe, conclude the collection with an unusually gritty string-band style. Though the sound quality is extremely poor on a few of the recordings in this set, and some of the performances mediocre or redundant, the duets by Mississippi Sarah and Daddy Stovepipe and the six minutes of the Mobile Strugglers represent some of the most thrilling sounds to come out of the period, or out of the state, whose contributions to early blues and country music are generally overlooked. Recommended, if only for the lead vocal and mandolin/violin backup on the Strugglers' "Fattenin' Frogs," or for Mississippi Sarah's spoken protest that "I've got too many men to have any sense." ~ Burgin Mathews