100 Recordings From 20 Years of Vintage Blues

A new four-CD collection, “When the Sun Goes Down,” shines a very bright light on the blues, a genre whose name sometimes seems to describe its very nature. The collection specifically celebrates the pioneering Victor label and its budget subsidiary, Bluebird, by gathering 100 recordings from the mid-1920s to the ‘40s, many unavailable since their original release on 78-rpm records.

“When the Sun Goes Down” serves them up in wonderfully clear audio that belies but does not undermine their true vintage.

Producers Colin Escott and Barry Feldman are after something bigger than simply reissuing classic blues, as implied in the subtitle common to the four individual volumes: “The Secret History of Rock & Roll.” Given sales figures for blues, this isn’t simply a canny marketing ploy to take advantage of a general roots revivalism in effect since the surprise success of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Down From the Mountain.”

Call this one “Up From the Delta,” a journey that begins in the 1920s, a golden era for rural blues that would become urbanized and electrified during the next 20 years. It was a time when almost every major label traveled south to record blues musicians in Atlanta, Memphis and Nashville. And although some musicians traveled to New York, Chicago became the core of the music’s transformation, in great part because it was home to chief Bluebird talent scout and producer Lester Melrose.

The material collected here informed the birth of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, and inspired the blues and folk revivals of the ‘60s. Many of the songs first recorded for Bluebird remain blues staples and starting points for multi-genre explorations, but the original versions have for the most part survived by proxy, by word of mouth or through foreign reissues.

There’s no better example of the embodiment of the series’ subtitle than the hard-to-find 78 that essentially ignited the rock ‘n’ roll revolution, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s roughhewn 1946 Victor release, “That’s All Right.”

It’s taut and powerfully rhythmic, with Crudup’s keening tenor and propulsive electric guitar chordings braced by Ransom Knowling’s bass and Judge Riley’s snappy drums.

Growing up in Memphis, Elvis fell under its sway, and in that awkward first session with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, it’s the song he pulled out of his subconscious meld of blues, country, rockabilly and gospel. It became Elvis’ first Sun record and cleared the path to his seminal sound. The singer’s early ambition was surprisingly specific: “If I ever got to the place where I could feel all ol’ Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

There are many other signal tracks in this collection: Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues,” which later became Muddy Waters’ classic “Rolling Stone,” inspiring the naming of both a rock band and a rock magazine; Sonny Boy Williamson’s version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” a fixture in the repertoire of bands like the Yardbirds, the Grateful Dead and Ten Years After, as well as such disparate singers as Waters, Rod Stewart and Taj Mahal.

Also available are Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers’ “Viola Lee Blues,” recorded by the Grateful Dead on its 1967 debut; Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” which would become an Allman Brothers staple; Big Joe Williams’ mournful “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” adapted by several dozen acts; and Pine Top’s 1935 track “Every Day I Have the Blues,” the earliest known recording of a song that became a standard for both Joe Williams and B.B. King.