Consumer Guide Album

Wild About My Lovin': Beale Street Blues 1928-1930 [RCA, 1991]
I don't know about Frank Stokes or Jim Jackson--acoustic-guitar songsters can fade to gray when their material isn't on the money. But as a longtime addict of Yazoo's Memphis Jug Band double-LP, I happily mainline Cannon's Jug Stompers' quarter-CD. Immersed in pop and vaudeville and minstrelsy because that was the competition, slick enough for slickers and downhome enough for traveling men, this stuff is a music of back alleys and medicine shows. Eventually it will spawn jump blues--and rock and roll. A