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Keith Richards Blues Collection In this the "Year of the Blues" the ARChive is proud to announce the acquisition of its first Robert Johnson original 78 recording, "Me and The Devil Blues"/"Little Queen of Spades." (Vocalion, 04108, 78rpm, 10", 1937).
Johnson (1911-1938) is the seminal bluesman, his music the launching pad for countless blues-tinged careers in the 60s, mince for titanic soul-struggles and ground zero for the badboy style of all the puffs and doggs that followed. This disc is one of the eleven known 78s released before Johnson's death. The first, "Terraplane Blues," was his most popular, selling maybe 5000 copies. Ours was recorded in the back room of a warehouse in Dallas, Johnson's final recording session (he only had two) on June 20, 1937. It's hard to believe that few people had ever heard Johnson's music until 1961 when Columbia released the "King of the Delta Blues Singers" LP. By the way, there are only 10-15 copies of "Me and The Devil Blues" known to exist, and we're proud to preserve one here at the ARChive. This disc was purchased through the generous donation of Keith Richards, and is part of the Keith Richards Blues Collection here at the ARChive. Mr. Richards is a member of the ARChive's Board of Advisors and has been funding a dedicated collection of blues here at the ARC for the past few years. His help has been invaluable in acquiring and cataloging this important collection here at the library. So far we've catalogued nearly 5000 LPs and CDs in our collection. While it's a thrill to see the 70 John Lee Hooker LPs in a tidy batch, the real fun is the obscurata like Bobby Bland's Ain't Nothing You Can Do (Duke, DLP 78) with the great cover by René (pictured), seven British Alexis Korner LPs, including, Red Hot (Transatlantic, TRA 117, UK) and within the forty-two 10" and 12" Leadbelly LPs, I'm Never Gone, (Folk Art, FLP 5004) with his death certificate on the cover.
Our simple goal it to assemble a top-notch Blues collection at the ARChive, second to none. Blues LP Covers Below is a gallery of some of our favorite Blues LP covers...
Blues Study Guides Below are a series of study guides we created for the Blues -- a way to help catalogers better understand genre designations. The goal is to simplify very complicated and detailed distinctions between the many Blues styles, which we've broken down into the three largest, all encompassing groups. Blues overview (pdf)
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