Consumer Guide Album

New York City Blues [Ace, 2022]
Since unlike Memphis, Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, in its Latin-tinged way New Orleans, and for that matter Detroit, my hometown never had a blues scene, this compilation seemed a stretch conceptually on its title alone. But as you'd expect from the co-author of New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits From Harlem to the Village, compiler Larry Simon has an argument to make, and as you could only hope he also has the recordings to back it up. Right--crucial stylistic variations on the blues arose in the Delta, eastern Texas, the Carolinas. But given its sheer size and a sophisticated African-American community well-stocked with jazz adepts and Southern emigres, the home of the most vital pop music industry in the world was equipped to absorb all those variations and more. Fitting right into Simon's concept are budding r&b stars Lonnie Johson, Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown, visiting titans Muddy Waters, Blind Boy Fuller, and Victoria Spivey, Corona Queens fixture Reverend Gary Davis, a bustling folk scene, and the largest complement of hip bizzers in the nation. The grabber that opens, by a 65-year-old named Larry Dale about whom I know naught else, is followed by a version of the Fuller classic "Step It Up and Go" Fuller himself recorded a year before he died in 1940. They mesh perfectly. A comp that makes its case--and closes with both sides of Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk." A-