Various

★★★★ Down Home Blues: Miami, Atlanta And The South Eastern States – Blues In The Alley WIENERWORLD. CD

An 83-track 3-CD cornucopia of ’40s-’60s blues – obscure, oddball and outstanding.

The baggy title of the fifth in Wienerworld’s excellent series embraces the wheezy oneman band Frank Edwards, downhome singer-guitarists Curley Weaver (with Blind Willie McTell) and John Lee (Baby Please Don’t Go featuring an evocatively rustic panpipes player), early work by Ray Charles, Earl Hooker and Chick Willis, Jimmy Wilson venturing again (and again) down Tin Pan Alley, and longbeloved tracks like Jerry McCain’s She’s Tough and Steady, Danny Boy Thomas’s Kokomo Me Baby and Eddie Hope’s A Fool No More. These familiar landmarks punctuate a map of profoundly littleknown figures such as John Bullard and Poor Jim, or the accomplished Tennessee pianist Richard Armstrong. Even the most attentive blueswatcher may never have spied some of these characters. Compiled by Chris Bentley and Peter Moody, it’s accompanied by an informative and handsomely illustrated 78-page booklet.