Last Thoughts On B.B. King, 1925-2015.

B.B. King was the last major blues legend whose life told the story of the 20th century.

He began a poor sharecropper in the south playing acoustic blues until heading north, going electric, & taking the history of the music with him.

Others that did it along side of him were Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, & John Lee Hooker--his only real rivals for the king of the modern electric blues.

But as his name implied, it was B.B. who would be King. He wasn't particularly sexy like Muddy Waters, raw like Howlin' Wolf, or cool like John Lee Hooker, but maybe that was point. He simply took all of those traits & melded them together into something that was greater than the sum of its parts--a platonic ideal of the blues, defined by call-&-response singing & playing, clever lyrics, & a passion that could be felt coming straight through the record.

Perhaps because he was younger, perhaps because he lived longer, perhaps because he was simply more mainstream, B.B. King outstripped the success of his contemporaries & owned the music as its living embodiment, in a way that James Brown did for soul & Johnny Cash did for country. Which is to say that he wasn't necessarily the greatest or most influential performer in his field, he just kept on going through a key period of time & let the genre come to him.

God knows he worked hard for it.

In The New York Times' obituary of King, they report that he played no less than 342 one-night stands in 1956 alone. Think about that for a minute. That means the year that Elvis broke rock music through to the mainstream & Eisenhower won a second a term in a landslide, B.B. King had exactly 24 days off (1956 was a leap-year), on average one every other week.

Less than a decade later, in 1965, when he recorded his signature LP, Live At The Regal, he was already billing himself as "The King Of The Blues" with a straight face. The album, which has since won virtually every accolade an album can, from being inducted to The National Recording Registry to The Grammy Hall Of Fame, bears the title out. B.B. King--& as some argue, the blues itself--is in top form, turning love into loss & sadness into irony.

Hear the way he opens with "Every Day I Have The Blues" but turns it into a badge of honor instead of a lament. Listen to the way he sings about the way in which the title figure in "Sweet Little Angel" spreads her wings & marvel at the simplicity with which he unites the sacred & the secular. & check out the album's most famous moment, in the breakdown of "How Blue Can You Get?" where he sings, "I gave you seven children & now you want to give them back!" & the way the audience responds; the only thing that matches it in American music are James Brown drawing out "Lost Someone" on his Live At The Apollo & Johnny Cash singing about how he shot a man "just to watch him die" in "Folsom Prison Blues" on Live At Folsom Prison.

It is on one hand a public performance, but on the other a private confession. Now, maybe James Brown did lose someone & Johnny Cash at some point felt like shooting a man just to watch him die, but B.B. King, who by his own account fathered some 15 children by 15 different women, might have actually felt at some point like giving them back. It is perhaps this kernel of truth that gives the performance its wrenching bite, & it is what we respond to a half-century after its release.

* * *

Also unlike James Brown & Johnny Cash, I was fortunate enough to see B.B. King play live.

It was 1996 in Austin, Texas, soon after he released his autobiography Blues All Around Me. I read the first part of the book out of obligation of the concert coming up--I always found that co-author David Ritz, who did such a great job on the Ray Charles & Marvin Gaye autobiographies, did a bit of an overwrite on his part when trying to capture King's voice--& listened to Live At Regal & the few other B.B. King recordings I had around. When it came to the classic blues, I was always more interested in the old, scratchy Robert Johnson & Charley Patton stuff; when it came to the electric blues Howlin' Wolf was my man.

All of which is to say that B.B. King was far from my favorite artists.

But his concert was one of the best I've ever seen.

I've seen lots of great shows--from the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, & Eric Clapton on down through Elliott Smith, The Pixies, & Guided By Voices--but B.B. King had a power that could only be compared to Chuck Berry & Jerry Lee Lewis. There's something about that pre-television generation who were doing it before rock was born & continued doing it once it had splintered into a million pieces, that gave them a power that not even the finest Bob Dylan concert could begin touch. I suspect the same would've been true had I seen James Brown or Johnny Cash; I know the same would've been true had I seen Elvis.

But B.B. King. In some ways, his concert was the best because, compared to Chuck Berry & Jerry Lee Lewis, he was the biggest. He came out in a silver-sequined jacket suit that made him look like a disco ball, beaming as he opened with "Every Day I Have The Blues." He had Lucille, his signature black Gibson guitar, & made his weird "lemon" faces as he jammed, over-fluttering his fingers with each touch of vibrato so that his hand looked like a mad butterfly.

He didn't so much sing & play as much as he did hold court. The audience was enraptured from the first moment he stepped on stage & the band--complete with a rhythm section & horn section--followed his every move, knowing when to turn things up for a rocker & shift it back down for a ballad or solo.

It is the only concert I had ever seen where the music literally did not stop--the backing musicians simply keep the 12-bar blues going quietly while he spoke between the songs. Some people don't like the blues--& in turn, B.B. King--because they think every song sounds the same. B.B. King's concert turned this notion on its head, literally playing the entire set like it was a single song. In so doing, he both proved this criticism of blues music while pulling the rug out from under it, showing how so many different moods & textures could emerge from the same primordial blues swamp.

* * *

As I mentioned earlier, I saw B.B. King in the mid-'90s, when MTV's Unplugged show had redefined music was performed--as exemplified by artists as diverse as Eric Clapton & Nirvana. Everyone who was a serious artist or band seemed to want to make an "unplugged" album--many of whom did so on the official program (Rod Stewart & Tony Bennett) & many others who did so on their own (think The Rolling Stones' Stripped, if you can remember that).

B.B. King did a similar thing at the middle of his show. At one point, the horns & extraneous musicians strutted off to the sides, while a core blues combo remained, with B.B. King doing what Clapton & Kurt Cobain did on MTV: He sat in a chair. King played a more intimate, down-home blues that sounded closer to the small bands that Muddy Waters first recorded with in Chicago than his own flashy stage show. It was all so well choreographed & performed, it made me almost forget that he was probably doing this at least in part to mask his diabetes had made him too weak to stand for an entire performance. But I digress.

At any rate, this smaller, more focused blues playing was the blues that I liked to hear, with less going on & more focus on the lyrics and the interaction between the instruments. It wasn't an "Unplugged" show per se--B.B. still held onto his electric Lucille--but it had all the trappings of one. After all, Elvis's "sit-down" show of his "'68 Comeback Special," which inspired MTV Unplugged in the first place, featured the King (this time of rock) playing an electric Gibson.

With the mood & the playing more down-home, B.B. King spun some good stories. Turns out he is as good of a storyteller as he is a performer (as if the two could be separated) & with his actual hard life--which is to say, the fact that he had grown up poor on a sharecropping farm--it made everything feel more real, earned, & special.

At one point, he talked about the fish-fry parties that people threw to make rent money, how everyone would come out with bootleg liquor, how the blues combos would play for hours on end, how the people would dance and dance, how this late-night celebrations were such a welcome escape from their early morning farm work; "& then as the night kept wearing on," B.B. King said, "Until the time that the sun was coming up for a new work day, & we'd all say--"

THE THRILL IS GONE!

With those words, the stage exploded with excitement as the horn players & extra musicians reappeared on cue, & B.B. King stood up from the chair to perform with his full band once again. Before anyone could catch their breath, B.B. King was singing "The Thrill Is Gone," his signature biggest hit & the first song most people know him by.

For someone whose music was so timeless, "The Thrill Is Gone" sounds very much like the time in which it was recorded, in a late-'60s haze where rock had conquered blues & funk was threatening to conquer rock. It is a slow blues, with keyboard & strings, but is such a good performance--such a good idea--that it cuts through its surroundings.

The thrill is gone, the thrill has gone away
The thrill has gone, baby, he thrill has gone away
You know you done me wrong baby
& you'll be sorry someday

What more has the blues ever tried to say? There is simplicity to this song, a logic that maintains its strength. Taken altogether, it is little wonder that this is the quintessential blues song of the quintessential blues performer.

Even as I watched B.B. King live singing this in a manner that was entirely rehearsed, I knew I was experiencing something very special--& very real. For, despite what B.B. King was singing to me at that moment, the thrill was here.

* * *

It's hard to believe that B.B. King is gone because he's always been here, a cultural institution, an epoch upon himself.

He cut records for Sam Phillips at Sun Records three years before Elvis Presley walked through the door.

He had a #1 R&B single, "3 O'Clock Blues," in February 1952, before contemporaries like Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Little Richard, & James Brown had done the same.

He would have an additional 3 #1 R&B records--"You Know I Love You," "Please Love Me," & "You Upset Me Baby"--all before Bill Haley & His Comets scored rock's first #1 pop hit, "Rock Around The Clock."

He kept playing one-night stands through Elvis, through Beatlemania, through Dylan plugging in, & Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire; if the resulting document of this period, 1965's Live At Regal, is any indication, on a good night he could at the very least meet any of these artists on his own terms.

He played Bill Graham's Fillmore West in 1968 to a full house of long-haired white hippies, & found his music embraced by a new audience.

He released his signature hit, "The Thrill Is Gone," late in 1969, capping rock's finest year that included Elvis's From Elvis In Memphis, The Beatles' Abbey Road, & The Rolling Stones's Let It Bleed--not to mention Hendrix at Woodstock, Bob Dylan at The Isle Of Wight, & The Stones at Altamont. It would become his biggest pop hit (#15 on the pop charts & #3 on the R&B charts) & score him his first Grammy Award (for 1971's Best Male R&B Vocal Performance). When David Cassidy was trying to establish his cred in the early '70s, he cited "The Thrill Is Gone" as his favorite song.

In 1977, he straddled both sides of the cultural spectrum by appearing as himself on an episode of Sandford & Son, & later receiving an honorary doctorate of music from Yale University.

In 1980, he was among the first 20 inductees into the Blues Hall Of Fame, along with the likes of Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, & John Lee Hooker.

In 1987, he was among the second set of inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, along with the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Joe Turner, Bo Diddley, Aretha Franklin, & Marvin Gaye.

That same year he would receive a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, making him the first blues musician to receive the honor. Other recipients that year included Billie Holiday & Hank Williams.

The following year, he recorded the hit "When Love Comes To Town" with U2 at Sun Records for their album Rattle & Hum; it was his first single to make the US rock charts (#2) & the UK pop charts (#6).

In 1990, he received The National Medal Of The Arts from President George H.W. Bush; in 2006, he received The Presidential Medal Of Freedom from President George W. Bush.

& in 2012, he was among the performers at "In Performance At The White House: Red White & Blues" where he jammed on "Sweet Home Chicago" with President Barack Obama.

* * *

I am loathe to close.

There was still so much I wanted to say--how B.B. King's first Top 40 hit, "Rock Me Baby," occurred in 1964 & would be covered by Otis Redding & Jimi Hendrix by the decade's end; how he sang about his brother going to Korea in 1960's "Sweet Sixteen" & would later change the line to be about coming back from Vietnam the following decade; how over time his records became more commercial & pop-oriented, with strings providing call-&-response lines along with his guitar; how in a recording from 1979, he tells the Queen Of England to never look down.

How some of his best song titles played like hard-earned truths of sage advice: "Paying The Cost To Be The Boss." "Never Make A Move Too Soon." "Help The Poor."

How in 1971, he sang what is perhaps the greatest blues lyric of them all:

Nobody loves me but my mother--

& she could be jivin' too.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Henry Thomas's Skeleton Key.

Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas was a bluesman who recorded about two dozen sides some 85 years ago. Born in 1877, he was one of the oldest blues singers to record & one of few to use a kind of panpipe called quills—an ancient instrument that was once ubiquitous in the American South, but was falling out of fashion by the time the blues craze hit in the 1920s. Chances are he would be nothing more than a minor footnote if it weren't for the fact that 2 of his songs—"Fishing Blues" & "Old Country Stomp"—were included in Harry Smith's legendary Anthology Of American Folk Music.

His advanced age (he was 50 when he made his first record) coupled with old-fashioned instrumentation (a guitar pitched up high in an open D tuning, which smacked of a style that was honed on banjo) & the good fortune of recording for a company that was content to release mostly non-blues material (the hot music that pretty much all labels of African-American music was releasing in his time) led to something bigger than even Henry Thomas's 6'3" frame: An insight into pre-blues music.

Pretty much everything we know about Henry Thomas is thanks to the blues historian Mack McCormick; his essay for an early double-LP set of Thomas's songs is the standard to which all liner notes should be held—you can read them here.

One of the key things McCormick points out is how Henry Thomas was the child of ex-slaves, which makes him part of the first generation of African-Americans to be born free. It is said Thomas left home at age 11 & never looked back. Usually traveling around with no home is seen as a cruel punishment in the blues, but for people of Thomas's generation, being able to roam freely may have seemed like a privilege.

& so roam Henry Thomas did. He appears to have no set address—like Woody Guthrie, he rode the rails, like Kurt Cobain, he slept under bridges. He played on Texas street-corners, at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, & most importantly to us, in a Chicago studio, yielding 23 songs over 5 sessions from 1927 to 1929.

Henry Thomas recorded a special kind of music. It has been called "songster" music, but I think of it more as "skeleton key" music—the sound of a genre (blues) emerging from the ether, in a sea of shared verses & melodies. Based on his recorded output, Henry Thomas didn't seem to write songs as much as he adapt them or form them on the fly. As a result, rhythms, melodies, & structures can change on a whim, such that one song can shift into another.

There's Thomas's "Bob McKinney" from 1927, an early version of "Stagger Lee," which begins about a bad man, much in the style of Mississippi John Hurt's "Stack O'Lee," which Hurt would record one year later. But midway through, Thomas starts singing a refrain of "Take me back," which the song then seems to do—taking him back in time or memory or simple association—until he lands with a version of "Make Me A Pallet On The Floor," which has an entirely different chord structure & swing, as well as nothing to do with Bob McKinney or anything from the first section of the song. A born journeyman, Henry Thomas performed his songs like he lived his life: Made up as he went along.



Listening to Thomas's recordings is a uniquely organic experience—sometimes a verse is sung in one song that crops up identically in another; sometimes a song about one subject turns into a song about another; sometimes a verse format is rigidly kept; sometimes it feels like you're listening to a medley. & then there are times when a single line is repeated 3 or 4 times in one verse, & then switched up with a call-&-response in the next, which makes you feel as though you are witnessing the blues being stumbled upon right before your ears.




His songs run together like the common well of music from which the blues—& later rock—would form. This is music all about forward motion, not just in the restlessness of the songs themselves, but of the way in which his songs set the structure for countless others. In "Lovin' Babe," he sings about "Goin' down that road feelin' bad," which Woody Guthrie would turn into "Goin' Down That Road Feelin' Bad" & name it as the most popular song of the Dust Bowl migrants; in "Bull Doze Blues," he sings of "Going up the country," which Canned Heat would perform at Woodstock as "Going Up The Country"; in "Shanty Blues," he sings that his lover "Cause me to weep, cause me to moan, cause me to leave my home," which Lead Belly would record sing in "In The Pines" in New York City in 1944—& Nirvana would record in New York City 49 years after that.



In "Railroadin' Some," Thomas turns his guitar into a chugging train & his quills into its whistle, calling out the stops several decades before James Brown closed his Live At The Apollo LP with his then-current hit, "Night Train"; in "Arkansas," he sings a version of "My Name Is Johanna" that sounds like it could be the grandfather of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lodi"; in "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance," he sets up the phraseology—if not quite the music—for Bob Dylan's version, one of the few non-originals included on his breakthrough LP The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which is definitely his finest folk album, if not his finest album, period (for what it's worth, it is the one in the Library Of Congress's National Registry).



Countless more phrases & tunes whiz by in the music. Henry Thomas sings about having a girl who works hard; being Alabama bound; going back to Baltimore; the last fair deal going down; looking where the sun done gone; standing on the corner; going around the mountain; being a poor boy a long way from home; wearing that ball & chain. His music can take any form—he can blow his panpipes like a train whistle; he can howl to imitate a dog; he can stop his guitar cold & pull the song out from under you, before returning with a huckster's smile & tagline. He sings about sinful women; he praises God; he sings a song about a little red caboose that wouldn't sound out of place in a nursery school sing-a-long. His songs feature people walking, standing, dancing, running, traveling, going fishing, cooking with shortening bread, riding on trains, waiting for trains, riding the rods under trains, driving in automobiles, sailing in boats, working in a pink & blue dress, sitting in jail.

One can only wonder what a few more recording sessions would have yielded—it's hard to imagine an even bigger scope of American life than what we already have. Like Lead Belly, who was 14 years younger than Thomas, it's not hard to picture him singing for hours on magnetic tape songs that he learned & made up.

It should be said, however, that Henry Thomas wasn't a masterful songwriter, musical virtuoso, or a great singer—his music does not have the painstaking craft of Robert Johnson, the musicianship of Muddy Waters, or the powerful delivery of a Howlin' Wolf. He is a rudimentary guitarist & a capable if unremarkable vocalist; only his exquisite quills playing marks him for any uniqueness. He is a street performer, nothing less, nothing more, & it is this that gives him his power.

Listening to his 23 songs—more original recordings than any other songster of the period, as Lead Belly largely made non-commercial field recordings & Mississippi John Hurt only expanded his discography once he was rediscovered in the 1960s—gives you the feeling of taking an African-American performer from off the street (literally) & listening to what music he plays—to make people entertained, to make people dance, to make people think, to make people sing along, to make people forget their troubles.

We may not know exactly what the average folk music sounded like to the average folk for the first generation of free African-Americans until the blues hit in the 1920s, but thanks to Henry Thomas, we have a better idea, a skeleton key that unlocks all that came after it—& maybe, at least some of what came before it.

Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas: Lost & Found.

Some time ago, in one of my first blog entries, I wrote a piece about Geeshie Wiley's recording of "Last Kind Word Blues." At the time, virtually nothing was known of Wiley, which only reinforced the song's unsettling mystique. "Like Wiley herself," I wrote, "the song seems to mysteriously exist on its own terms, holding all but revealing nothing."

"Last Kind Word Blues" is a song about a woman who hears the last kind words of her WWI lover to send his body to his mother-in-law if he doesn't survive the war (he won't). It is a song about a woman who, when reflecting upon her own death, decides she'd rather be eaten by buzzards than receive a proper burial. It is a song about a woman whose simple actions—walking across a rich man's field, going to the depot & looking up at the sign—take on the epic weight of a Biblical parable. It is a song about a woman who recounts her mother's dying words to her to not be so wild, in a voice that is void of any sense of wildness, let alone any trace of youthful daughterhood. It is a song in which a woman looks across the Mississippi River & sees her own face on the other side. It is a song about a woman who is inflicted with a feeling that she cannot get out of her & believes she has to cross the deep blue sea.

It is a song about profound loneliness, the finality of death, & the solitude of sin.

It is a song about isolation, about entrapment, about depression.

It is a song about Purgatory.

"Geechie Wiley can see her face from across the Mississippi River because hers is the only face to see;" Greil Marcus wrote in Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old, Weird America: The World Of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes), "all that she loves are dead, & there is no hint of community or society, of town & fellowship, anywhere in her song. The country it makes is a wasteland." Or, as Don Kent put it in the liner notes of the 1994 Yazoo Records compilation Mississippi Masters: Early American Blues Classics, 1927-35: "If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented."

But Geeshie Wiley did exist, as did her singing partner, Elvie Thomas, as evidenced in a remarkable new article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, "The Ballad Of Geeshie & Elvie," which was featured as the cover story on The New York Times Magazine last month. For anyone who's a fan of Wiley, Thomas, or the country blues, this article is a watershed & must be read in full; Sullivan's ability to describe the big picture while simultaneously focusing on the details is masterful, & much of his work would not be possible without the help of Caitlin Love, who dug through the trenches to provide the groundwork for many of the article's revelations.

In the article, it is Thomas who emerges most fully from the mystic chords of history. She was born August 7, 1891, went to prison at 18 for unknown reasons, played picnics with (& outsang) blues legends, teamed up with another female blues singer named Geeshie Wiley, recorded a few records with her in Wisconsin, then later turned to God, & apparently lesbianism. By the time she died on May 20, 1979, she was best remembered as a strict, God-loving hermit who chain-smoked cigarettes & had the most beautiful voice in the Mount Pleasant Church of Houston, Texas. She had cut off all ties to her blues-performing past—helped, no doubt by what Sullivan terms the "long, invisible blade between the two destinies" of "Elvie, a singer, who lives nowhere, & L.V., a woman, at her house in Houston"—such that her own family were surprised to hear of her unique blues legacy when the article was being published.

Geeshie Wiley largely remains in the shadows. We learn her birth name, Lillie Mae Scott, that she was born in Louisiana around 1908, married a man named Thorton Wiley who Thomas did not care for, & went off to live in rural Oklahoma some three years after recording her entire known catalog of a half-dozen sides. As Caitlin Love discovered, Geeshie Wiley comes sharpest into view is on the death certificate of her estranged husband who "died of stab wound between collarbone & neck" by a "Knife wound inflicted by Lillie Mae Scott."

What makes this so epic is that Wiley seems to predict this act of violence on the flipside of "Last Kind Word Blues" in a song called "Skinny Leg Blues."

I'm gonna cut your throat, baby, gonna look down in your face
I'm gonna let some lonesome graveyard be your resting place.

Given the events that soon played out after Geeshie Wiley recorded this song, these words are jarring enough, but considering the musical creative environment of the day, they are all the more bizarre and unusual. In their definitive Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music, Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor write about what a relatively recent phenomenon the autobiographical song is: "Performers often use autobiographical song now as a talisman of their personal authenticity, parading their insecurities & problems through song in order to boast of how 'real' they are. But it was not common to give such detail in song until relatively recently, especially not in songs aimed at a mass market."

Barker & Taylor's example of a rare autobiographical exception that proves the rule is Jimmie Rodgers' "T.B. Blues," which he recorded in January 1931; when he died of tuberculosis two years later, people made the then-unusual leap of connecting the song's lyrical content with the singer's plight. Wiley's recording of "Skinny Leg Blues" was made in March 1930. In the time between Jimmie Rodgers recorded "T.B. Blues" & died of the disease he sang about, Geeshie Wiley cut her baby's throat.

Thus, a post-rock temptation to take all lyrics as autobiographical is seemingly justified by Geeshie Wiley's words & actions. If the most dire of her lyrics are proven accurate, what does this mean about her as a musical artist & lyricist? Is this another way in which she was ahead of her time? & does this now grant us the ability to listen to all of her songs that much more literally, the way we might be tempted to hear a John Lennon or a Joni Mitchell song?

Part of the unique chill of "Last Kind Word Blues" is how directly Geeshie sings it; this is not the lament of some overwrought torch song or a blues that uses irony like a shield to distance the singer from the hardship they express. When Geeshie tells you the last kind words of her lover, you take her at her word, just like she takes her lover at his word within the song.

The effect is that Geeshie is further drawn into the world of "Last Kind Word Blues" & further separated from our own. & yet, only a few weeks ago, it was largely unknown any concrete detail of her life, down to her real name. "Last Kind Word Blues," then, pulls the ultimate trick—it continues to recede even as we gain new facts that should allow us to view it closer. As Sullivan hints, our mind races at his article's newfound information. Given L.V.'s lesbian lifestyle & guardedness about Geeshie, is it possible that the two women were lovers? & if so, did Thorton Wiley suspect, know, or walk into the wrong room at the wrong time? Did L.V. secretly blame herself for Thorton Wiley's murder? It would be enough to make someone want to turn to the church & never look back.

It is tempting to say that we'll never know what happened, but given the recent small avalanche of information that has appeared, perhaps maybe we will. As a professor I sometimes do research for likes to say, "It's all out there waiting. You just have to find it."

Still, perhaps our postmodern, post-feminist readings of Geeshie & L.V. tell us more about the age that we live in than the one that we tell ourselves we are reconstructing. But now, with the long-forgotten murder of Thorton Wiley & Geeshie Wiley's recorded prophetic confession in the year prior, the strangest force imaginable now seems to attach itself to Geeshie's recordings: Truth.

One cannot help to wonder if maybe, just maybe, when Geeshie Wiley looked across the Mississippi River, she could see her face on the other side.

The 50 Greatest American Albums.

Nowhere is America freer than in its music.

Over the centuries, songs have passed between the races, over the terrains, through the social levels, & around on phonograph records. Like the finest American artifacts, authenticity falls flat as a vastly more complex melting pot of people, ideas, & songs take shape. But what are the finest examples America has to offer of this? I've seen lists of the best rock albums, pop albums, soul albums, jazz albums, blues albums, etc., but rarely one that went by country of origin, as opposed to style or genre. But what are the greatest American albums of all-time? 

What follows is my humble attempt to answer just that. I tried to keep it as "free" as I could—my only restrictions being that it had to be music (i.e., no spoken word), commercial (i.e., no field recordings), & in its "best" representation (hence for things like Armstrong's Hot Fives & Sevens & Elvis's Sun recordings, I tried to find the most definitive modern issue). The rest was totally open. So here's a list of rock, pop, R&B, soul, rap, country, folk, gospel, blues, cajun, & more.

If American music is a temple to freedom, these 50 artifacts laid its foundation.

1. The Anthology of American Folk Music, Various Artists [Edited by Harry Smith].

The years between 1926-1932 were a watershed in American History, a time between the wars in which many of the hallmarks of modern America took place—the Jazz Age crashed into the Depression, Henry Ford introduced (& sold over 4 million of) the Model A, the Great Flood wreaked havoc on the Mississippi, Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, talking motion pictures were introduced, & FDR was elected.

But amongst all of this forward-looking culture was a group of people collectively looking back—to the 19th century, to the old country, to an old way of life that once was, could've been, or never was. Thanks to then-recent advances in recording technology (i.e., the electric microphone, among other things), "folk" music was being recorded commercially for the first time. &, to virtually everyone's surprise, it sold. Pretty damn well. This was in part because a large number of people buying these records didn't own record players, but got them anyway as a token of their culture.

There was old mountain ballads, country blues, rural spirituals, reels, two-steps, waltzes, archaic shape-note singers, unintelligible cajun tunes, love songs, jail songs, work songs, drinking songs, comedy songs, protest songs, preaching songs—& many several at once. For modern ears today, there are many simply weird songs—country & field hollers with surreal lyrics that came down from generation to generation, changing slightly with each new telling. The coo-coo is a pretty bird, she warbles, as she flies; but she never, hollers coo-coo, 'til the Fourth of July.

Thousands of these records were made, & then forgotten about, cut off by World War II as a relic of old times gone by. Then, in 1952, folklorist Harry Smith took his own collection of 78 RPM folk records & created the Anthology of American Folk Music, three double-record sets of 84 folk songs, meticulously & lovingly arranged: The first volume, Ballads, were American versions of old European ballads, placed in order & brought up-to-date by the inclusion of more recent event songs about the McKinley assassination, the Titanic, & Stagger Lee; the second volume, Social Music, was one disc of dance music followed by one disc of religious music; the third volume, Songs, was two discs of music that couldn't be easily classified any which way. Some of the collection's most enduring songs—Clarence Ashley's "The Coo-Coo," Bascom Lamar Lunsford's "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground," & Rabbit Brown's "James Alley Blues"—come from this volume.

Smith saw this music as a true American melting pot & was careful not to put any of the performers' race or genre on the set's liner notes, creating a veiled country in which someone's race & social standing could be as free as the music coming out of a 78 record.

The album became the founding document of the early-'60s folk boom, as kids like Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, & Roger McGuinn pored over copies, trying to figure out tunings, words, & meaning, incorporating much of it into their own modern American rock sound.

Because, if there's anything that the seemingly backward-looking music of the Anthology of American Folk Music shows us, it's that the finest American music stands at a crossroads—reaching deep into the past, while simultaneously charting the way towards the future.

2. Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings.

This is where music in America became American music. The sound achieved by Louis Armstrong's original Hot Five may not have invented jazz, but it perfected the sound.  Specifically, the triple lead parts of Armstrong's trumpet, Kid Ory's trombone, & Johnny Dodds's clarinet kept the sound cooking with an orderly chaos, instruments weaving in & out of each other, in a way that somehow felt at once orderly & improvised. Throw in Armstrong's charismatic vocals & you have a music that bears the fruit of extensive expertise, but casually knocked off in late-night sessions where almost anything could happen—& did. There was the groundbreaking scatting of "Heebie Jeebies," the virtuosity of "West End Blues," the beauty of "St. James' Infirmary"—& countless more, all classics in their own right & all in the versions that would solidify them as jazz standards in the decades to come. If America is truly the cradle of freedom, this is the first music to rock the cradle.

3. Sunrise, Elvis Presley.

At less than 20 songs of originally-released material, this is one of the cornerstones of American music. Like Louis Armstrong, Elvis didn't invent the music so much as he mastered it & perfected it as an art form for others to follow.  If Elvis is the biggest figure in America's biggest music, it's striking how small these founding documents are. At the center of the Sun recordings are 10 perfect sides—5 R&B songs backed by 5 country sides—that combined run less than 25 minutes. But with tunes like "That's All Right," "Good Rockin' Tonight," & "Mystery Train," this is about as rich as music gets, as you hear so many conflicting elements—blues & country, electric & acoustic, rural & urban, black & white—impossibly & effortlessly united by ELVIS. The most comprehensive collection of this music is the inexplicably out-of-print Sunrise, which has all of the masters, as well as at least one alternate take of each song, as well as early demos & live recordings, many of which were unreleased at the time. But if you ever need confirmation of the King of Rock & Roll's genius, just put on the first disc of masters & hear the music once again for the first time. & what a rush it is.

4. Lady in Satin, Billie Holiday.

The most controversial album by America's greatest singer, Lady in Satin has long divided its audiences & critics—& for obvious reasons.  Holiday was far past her prime by the time she made these records & it shows in every gravely twist of every nuanced word. But Holiday's chief innovation to popular music was to bring the emotion of the song to the forefront, not simply singing the song but performing it, akin to how an actor might read their lines. Songs like "I'm a Fool for You," "You've Changed," & "I'll Be Around" aren't just heard but felt—often devastating torch ballads handpicked by Lady Day herself. Everyone from Frank Sinatra & Elvis on down has been influenced by her in one way or another, & this, her final masterwork, plays just like it sounds: A world-weary master standing at the end of a long road. It is also, not coincidentally, the work that she felt was the finest of her career.

5. Songs for Swingin' Lovers!, Frank Sinatra.

There are two sides of America, & Sinatra caught them both—& in a row, at that. There is the late-night, failed & lonely, what-coulda-been lament that he captured in his first full-length album, In the Wee Small Hours, & there is the bright-&-shiny exuberance of his follow-up, Songs for Swinging Lovers! From the opening "You Make Me Feel So Young" through timeless classics like Gershwin's "Love Is Here to Stay" & Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," the music is as joyful as In the Wee Small Hours was stark. Sinatra's vocals—bold, blunt, offhanded, cocky, charming—were at the height of their power & conductor Nelson Riddle gave him perhaps the finest canvas he would ever grace in his long career. For it is Sinatra's voice that drives the album, a seemingly effortless extension of his personality & style. I mean, no matter who they are, everybody likes at least one Sinatra song. It would be almost un-American not to.

6. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan.

From the gunshot drum-hit opening "Like a Rolling Stone" through the surreal, winding finale of "Desolation Row," this is easily the most influential American album of the rock & roll era, & arguably the finest (really only Pet Sounds could challenge it). It was Dylan's first fully-electric album, released around the time he was plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival, & it captured the thrill & fury of his music—an endlessly fascinating sprawl of abstract poetry set to shambling garage rock that few would ever top, including Dylan himself. "Like a Rolling Stone" has since been voted the Greatest Rock & Roll Song of All-Time by Rolling Stone (natch!), but that's just the tip of the iceberg, as even ballads like "It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" & "Ballad of a Thin Man" show that Dylan could be just as terminal even when things were slowed down. So, how does it feel? Pretty damn epic.

7. Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band, Duke Ellington.

If Louis Armstrong was jazz music's heart—all spirit & joy—Duke Ellington was its mind—measured, considered, accomplished. Like Bloom's reckoning of Dante & Shakespeare, Armstrong & Ellington divide the jazz world, & between them, there is no third. These are the finest fruit of jazz's finest composer. They cover what is generally considered the finest period of Ellington's ever-fluctuating big band, named for bassist Jimmy Blanton & tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, in the period in which they overlapped between 1940-1942. It is, then, big band music perfected, with "Jack the Bear," "Ko Ko," "Cotton Tail," & Ellington's signature "Take the A Train." Like Armstrong's Hot Fives & Sevens, all are classics in their own right, & all refuse to be anything other than timeless.

8. Thriller, Michael Jackson.

It used to be that rock was rock & pop was pop.  Not so after Michael Jackson came along.  Arriving just as rock & roll's central narrative was splintering at the seams, spinning into classic R&B, dance-floor funk, rap recitations, heavy metal guitars, & a thousand more subcategories of subcategories, Jackson did something unimaginable: He brought them all together in one place, Thriller, which still stands as the greatest-selling album of all-time.  The songs of Thriller have become so ubiquitous that it's hard to hear how great (& innovative) they truly are—the cool funk of "Billie Jean," the street-smarts of "Beat It," the B-movie extravaganza of the title track.  There is not a dull moment in the pack, & to be sure, it became the template for countless other performers, with varying levels of success.  But Thriller stands above them all.

9. Precious Lord: Recordings of the Great Gospel Songs of Thomas A. Dorsey, Various Artists.

Thomas A. Dorsey began his career as blues singer Georgia Tom, scoring a major hit in 1928 with the innuendo-filled "Tight Like That." Four years later, upon learning of the death of his wife & unborn child, & wrote "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." In true gospel style, he was a man reborn, & in time would become "the father of black gospel music." Fast-forward some 40 years & you have this album, a two-LP set in which Dorsey leads a band playing his signature hits with the cream of the gospel singing crop bringing them to life. There's rocking gospel (Alex Bradford's "It's a Highway to Heaven"), tight vocal groups (the Dixie Hummingbirds' "Hide Me in Thy Bosom"), & slow, meditative spirituals (Marion Williams on the title track). It's arguably America's finest gospel album—a standing further cemented by its presence in the Library of Congress's inaugural class of the National Recording Registry.

10. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson.

Did Robert Johnson actually sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for his amazing blues musicianship?  We'll probably never know, but that doesn't matter—American myth has always proven greater than American truth, probably because it's always bigger. For, when you listen to mini-epics ("songs" feels like too tame of a word) like "Cross Road Blues," "Ramblin' on My Mind," "Stones in My Passway," & "Hell Hound on My Trail," it sure as hell sounds like a deal has been made with Satan (& bragged about in "Me & the Devil Blues"). This was music on a dark road that never ended, where any hope was sacrificed by pain, terror, & regret. Is it any wonder that everyone ever since (including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, & Eric Clapton, among scores more) couldn't get enough of it?

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11. Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, Ella Fitzgerald. In terms of range, pitch, & elocution, Ella Fitzgerald was probably the finest singer America has ever produced. & in terms of a songwriter working independently (as opposed to a music/lyricist pair), Cole Porter was probably the finest songwriter America ever produced. Put them together here, & with results like "Night & Day," "I Get a Kick Out of You," & "I've Got You Under My Skin," you have the American pop in its Platonic form.

12. At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash. If America could talk, it might have a voice like Johnny Cash's. Loud, forceful, & fearless, yet also able to spin a joke & tall-tale. When Cash recorded this, he met his match in the inmates of the California prison—indeed, just listen to the wild screams that follow his stone-cold "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." 

13. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Franklin. Lady Soul hit the ground running with this, her debut album for Atlantic Records. Songs like the title track & "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," pushed the fervor of the sacred into the bedroom of the secular creating a sound. Throw in the timeless love-as-political anthem "Respect," & you have a record that is at once masterful & timeless.

14. A Love Supreme, John Coltrane. Jazz as a sermon, meticulously conceived by one of its masters. It is somehow ethereal & focused, divine & rooted, & high-concept but easily accessible. The sound of Coltrane's horn is perfectly complemented by his combo's deft touch—& the result arguably beats rock's "concept album" by a few years.

15. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys. The finest LP by an American pop group of all-time, which perfected the rock album & inspired Sgt. Pepper, among countless other things. From the transcendent "Wouldn't It Be Nice" through the Caribbean folktale "Sloop John B." & the divine grace of "God Only Knows," few would ever top it.

16. Live at the Apollo, James Brown. Nobody would finance a live album for James Brown, so he paid for it himself. & thank God that he did. The result is the finest live album in rock, with the Godfather of Soul earning his title with every strut, grunt, & plea. The extended "Lost Someone" is rightfully praised, but I love how he suddenly breaks into "Please, Please, Please" at the drop of a hat.

17. Bing: His Legendary Years, 1941-1957, Bing Crosby. Four discs of the most influential vocalist in American history, who changed everything by plugging in a microphone & turning the belting-to-the-back-of-the-theater sound of the acoustic age into the quiet, sexy croon of the electric age. Songs like "Swinging on a Star" would make his legend, but it was his original version of "White Christmas" that remains the biggest-selling recording of all-time.

18. Live at Carnegie Hall, Judy Garland. Take one legend at her height, put her in Carnegie Hall in front of adoring fans, & record the whole thing. The result is a best-selling & Grammy Award-winning hit, which is considered by many to be the finest night of American entertainment ever captured.

19. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis. Miles Davis assembled one of the finest quintets in jazz history (including John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderly, & Bill Evans, among others) & produced this, an uncompromised, meditative album of beautiful solitude & blissful rumination. It also just happens to be the best-selling jazz album of all-time.

20. 40 Greatest Hits, Hank Williams. In 1949, Hank Williams became the first country singer to get 6 encores at the Grand Ole Opry; four years later, he was banned from the institution & dead at 29. This set contains the father of modern country music, its finest (& wittiest) songwriter, & a haunted performer all wrapped up in one, represented by signatures like "Move It Over," "Lovesick Blues," & "Your Cheatin' Heart."

21. What's Going on, Marvin Gaye. Motown's biggest-selling album turned on, tuned in, & dropped out—then surfaced with a sermon cloaked in a concept album. At first Motown refused to release it; when they finally relented, it became their best-selling LP—eyes looking towards heaven, but soul weary as hell.

22. The Best of Muddy Waters. A crib sheet to the master of the electric blues, & some of the most influential music ever waxed. "Rollin' Stone" alone would in time lend itself to rock's finest song, most enduring band, & definitive magazine. Meanwhile, classics like "I'm Your Hoochie-Coochie Man" & "I Just Want to Make Love to You" are stone-cold standards of the modern blues.

23. Dust Bowl Ballads, Woody Guthrie. A State of the Union, c. 1935, as told by a folk-poet chronicling the apocalypse. This was singer-songwriter music in its rawest (& finest) form, with all of the grit & grime of the Oklahoma plains. "The Great Dust Storm" best told the tale, but it's "I Ain't Got No Home" & Dusty Old Dust" that have become the classics. It was an album with sullen faces here, gallows humor there, & dust everywhere else.

24. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The portrait of the artist as a young folksinger, which all but doubles as a greatest hits of Dylan's early period. On his first album comprised (almost entirely) of original material, he would make his legend on "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Masters of War," & the Civil Rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind," which he claims to have written in 10 minutes.

25. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen. With the swagger of Elvis, the imagery of Dylan, & the dense soundscapes modeled on Phil Spector (plus a tip of the hat to Roy Orbison), rock & roll's prodigal son gets one last chance to make it real—& on tunes like "Thunder Road" & the title track—gets it.

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26. The Complete Savoy & Dial Master Takes, Charlie Parker. Jazz broken apart & reassembled as bop, by the man who would define the sound; the future starts here.

27. Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles, Billie Holiday. Hear Holiday go full blossom from a featured performer to a vocal legend, like the gardenia that adorned her hair.

28. Are You Experienced, Jimi Hendrix. Rock's finest debut & guitar's greatest genius takes acid (& music) as far as it can go in 1967.

29. Oklahoma!, Original Cast Recording. The first modern musical soundtrack—& as some like to tell it, the finest ever.

30. It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Public Enemy. Rap music's Sgt. Pepper is never badder than bad cuz a brother is madder than mad at the fact it's corrupt like a senator...

31. Time Out!, Dave Brubeck. A rare time when the popular audience was ahead of the critics, recognizing the exploration of odd time signatures in clever songs that never tire.

32. Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, Lead Belly. With the title track, grunge-tested & folklorist-approved—& for my money, the finest history of rock & roll you will ever hear.

33. Mingus Ah Um, Charles Mingus. A survey of African American music as led by jazz's most visionary bassist.

34. The Early Years, Bert Williams. The most famous American you've never heard of—an African American blackface performer who helped invent pop music (while perfecting deadpan humor).

35. Elvis' Golden Hits, Elvis Presley. "Hound Dog," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," & all the rest of his peak, just before the Army came & stole his crown.

36. West Side Story, Original Soundtrack Recording. Romeo & Juliet recast as a pop opera in New York City's Puerto Rican & American gangs singing—yet somehow it all works.

37. The Essential Jimmie Rodgers. "The Singing Brakeman" founds country music as we know it with a wink & a strum—& that signature high yodel.

38. Live at Carnegie Hall, Benny Goodman. Jazz goes uptown in the music's coming-out party, led by its greatest white innovator.

39. The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry. With "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," & "Johnny B. Goode"—the finest telling of the American Dream I've ever heard.

40. Nevermind, Nirvana. Punk breaks, thanks to a Seattle trio led by a loser who used to live under a bridge & a little ditty called "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

41. Will the Circle Be Unbroken, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. A history of country music as told by some of its masters—& the kids they inspired—in a triple-LP set that lives up to its title.

42. Like a Prayer, Madonna. Is there a dancefloor in the church or a church in the dancefloor? Either way, the answer is the Queen of Pop's masterpiece.

43. Live at Regal, B.B. King. Electric blues finest album, led off by "Every Day I Have the Blues," but crescendoing with "How Blue Can You Get?"

44. Red-Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson. A quiet song-cycle about a murderous preacher that all but solidified the '70s "outlaw" country sound.

45. Porgy & Bess, Original Cast Recording. Two New York Jews dream of life in the South, where the livin' is easy...

46. The Ramones. 1-2-3-4! As in: 1 sound, 2 minutes, 3 chords, 4 sick bubblegum singers posing as brothers—& inventing punk.

47. Star Wars Soundtrack, John Williams. Voted the finest film soundtrack of all-time by the American Film Institute, & who's to argue with them? The LP that launched a thousand ringtones.

48. In the Wee Small Hours, Frank Sinatra. The Voice's other side—melancholy, looking into an empty glass, & crooning "One for My Baby (& One for The Road)."

49. Cajun Dance Party: Fais Do-Do, Various Artists. Included for Amede Adroin's 6 Columbia songs (canjun's earliest commercial recordings), buttressed by other early masters.

50. Let Me Sing & I'm Happy, Al Jolson. America's most popular singer of the first half the 20th Century shows off his charisma in these tunes taken from his earliest talkies.