Three Blues Legends Tell the Way It Was

“Blues in the Mississippi Night” is an extraordinary reflection on the blues and the social conditions in the South that contributed to the classic pop form. The chronicle was considered so controversial in the ‘40s that the album wasn’t released for almost a decade after it was recorded.

Alan Lomax, the noted folk music historian and record producer, brought Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson together in a New York studio in 1946 to discuss the evolution of the blues.

Speaking frankly, the musicians outlined, in song and conversation, the poverty and racial oppression that they felt led to so much of the suffering found in the blues.

“For me, the session was a triumph,” Lomax recalls in the liner notes of the CD that was just released by Rykodisc. “Here, at last, black working-class men had talked frankly, sagaciously and with deep resentment about the inequities of the Southern system of racial segregation and exploitation.”

But the musicians, Lomax writes, were “terrified” after having the conversation played back for them. They told Lomax that their relatives who still lived in the South could be in danger if the record came out and their identities were revealed.

“And so, in BBC broadcasts, in articles and on the earlier (late ‘50s) United Artists edition of this recording, I disguised the location of the session and gave my friends fictitious names,” Lomax said.

Thus, the 51-minute Rykodisc album marks the first time the late bluesmen are officially credited as the men responsible for “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” Lomax said.

Rather than use photos of the artists, the album cover employs text--much like a book or magazine article--to underscore the uniqueness of this oral history.

Besides Lomax’s liner notes, the excellent 72-page booklet with “Blues in the Mississippi Night” contains the lyrics and a transcript of the conversation in the album.

MORRISON’S “BEST”--PolyGram Records’ recent, single disc “The Best of Van Morrison” album--which was criticized in this column for being too timid an overview of such an important artist’s career--was in no way a statement by PolyGram that Morrison is less worthy of a multiple-disc retrospective than such artists as the Allman Brothers and Eric Clapton, both of whom have been saluted by PolyGram with boxed CD sets, a company spokesman said.

Howard Paar, national director of publicity for the label, said that the “best of” album was designed with the cooperation of Morrison. Paar said that the company will explore the possibility of a multiple-disc set in the future.