The blues have been around nearly as long as America has had music to call its own, but it was when the music went electric in the wake of World War II that it began to attract a real audience outside of the Black community, albeit through a circuitous route. By the 1950s, every major American city had clubs where blues artists played for eager audiences, and small record companies made their music available to take home. It was the twin phenomena of rock & roll (initially a new name for blues and R&B tunes good for dancing that were sold to teenagers by radio hosts like
Alan Freed and
Dewey Phillips) and the obsessive British blues fans who collected the records and formed bands to replicate their sounds that gradually took the blues to a younger pop audience. By the mid-'60s, the blues musicians and tougher R&B acts who followed their example had earned a tremendous hip cachet and a growing multiracial audience, while white rock fans began digging into the blues, then picking up guitars and bending the musical traditions in new ways, filtered through garage rock, hard rock, and psychedelia. It was a remarkably fertile time for the music, and the British reissue label
Strawberry Records has delivered a fascinating and very entertaining overview of the era with the 2025 box set
Rollin' and Tumblin': American Electric Blues 1965-1971. The compilation takes a very broad view of what constitutes electric blues, and the track list encompasses
Howlin' Wolf's primal "Killing Floor"; the unrelenting boogie of
John Lee Hooker's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer"; the authentic but rock-minded work of the
Paul Butterfield Blues Band,
Johnny Winter, and
Canned Heat; the flamethrower power of
Janis Joplin on
Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Piece of My Heart"; the gloriously over-amped bombast of
Blue Cheer's "Parchment Farm" and the
MC5's "Motor City Is Burning"; the adolescent snot of the
Shadows of Knight's "Light Bulb Blues"; and the puzzling psychedelic meanderings of
Muddy Waters' "Tom Cat," from the infamous
Electric Mud LP. If the connecting thread between all this music doesn't always seem obvious, that's part of the point -- as different artists with different ideas began filtering the essential tenants of the blues through their imaginations, it began to change in unexpected, sometimes bracing ways, and the notion that
B.B. King,
Captain Beefheart, and
Wilson Pickett were all part of this process is a great lesson in the strange and wonderful ways of popular culture. Along with being thought-provoking,
Rollin' and Tumblin' is consistently great listening throughout, and every one of the 63 songs is worth hearing, while the mastering is crisp and well-detailed and the liner notes are fine and informative reading. If you like blues or rock of the 1960s at all,
Rollin' and Tumblin' will have more than a few tracks you'll love, and it's one of the best archival collections of the year. ~ Mark Deming
