Consumer Guide Album

The Rough Guide to Blues Women [World Music Network, 2016]
Despite some chronological overlap, this 25-tracker is functionally the sparer and earlier companion piece to MCA's two-CD 1999 Men Are Like Street Cars . . . Women Blues Singers 1928-1969, with only two artists duplicated: the legendary Memphis Minnie and the superb Mattie Delaney (whose two recordings total the comps split between them). Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith are here, as is Mamie Smith's 1920 game changer "Crazy Blues." So are such deserving legends as Memphis Jug Band sparkplug Hattie Hart, Bonnie Raitt fave Sippie Wallace, hard-headed careerist Victoria Spivey, and the barely recorded Geeshie Wiley. Fats Waller boosts Sara Martin's spirits on the eternal "T'Ain't Nobody's Business"; Bertha Hill gives voice to Louis Armstrong's solitude on the eternal "Trouble in Mind"; Bertha Lee moans Charley Patton's two-timing "Mind Reader Blues"; Kate McTell reiterates Blind Willie McTell's "God Don't Like It." Few of these artists have an oeuvre in them. Compiled, they add up to one. A-