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Monday, January 25, 2021

Delroy Edwards - (2014) Slowed Down Funk Vol. 3: Pure Evil CS

  L.A. Club Resource ‎– 011

VA - (2008) Victrola Favorites: Artifacts From Bygone Days 2xCD

The Dust-to-Digital label has compiled several exquisitely packaged anthologies of rare early- to mid-20th century roots and ethnic music, the two-CD (One/ Two) Victrola Favorites being no exception. What exactly the theme of this compilation is, however, is a little hard to ascertain, other than having been drawn from the collections of Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor. The 48 songs could hardly be more geographically and stylistically widespread, ranging from early American jazz, blues, and folk to indigenous and ritual music from China, India, Turkey, Korea, Japan, Egypt, and the Republic of Congo. There's chanting from Chinese Buddhist nuns, spoken word, oud and bamboo flute solos, West Indian jazz-calypso, a Thai costume drama, and even an "actual recording of Big Ben and traffic noises" from London. Though the images of Victrolas and ancient recording labels and ads in the liner notes might prep you for tracks originating from the 1920s and 1930s, actually the chronological span it covers is wider than that, running from about 1910 to the early '50s (with some of the dates being estimated). There are occasional cuts of U.S. origin that are clearly ancestors of strains of American pop, and even one fairly well-known performer, Blind Boy Fuller, whose rhythmic 1938 blues "Step It Up and Go" isn't far removed from R&B and rock & roll. But these are considerably outnumbered by less conventionally accessible world music recordings. So you'll need to have wide tastes to get the most out of this, though that's something that can be said of several other Dust-to-Digital releases. If you are an adventurous listener with a general liking for world music and vintage folk/ethnic sounds, it's a thoughtfully assembled banquet of material that provides windows into cultures now vanished or nearly vanished, or at least rarely exposed to most 21st century Western listeners.

VA - (2007) People Take Warning! (Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs 1913-1938) 3xCD


This three-disc (One/ Two/ Three), 70-track (30 of them new to the CD era) collection of murder ballads and disaster songs originally released on commercial 78s between 1913 and 1938 is, in spite of the archaic song structures and often crude sonic qualities on display, strangely contemporary in tone and feel, maybe because we've always been drawn to the scene of the accident, and even in this 21st century world of the Internet and all-day, all-night news channels, that's still as true as it ever was. We just don't write songs about such things so much anymore, and since one can just flip on the TV to get up to speed on the latest round of personal, local, and global tragedies, that's probably understandable. A quaint view of why these old songs were so popular back in the day is to say that's how the news traveled back then, but that wouldn't be true. The news media in the early 1900s in America was every bit as dogged and sensational as it is now, and these tragic songs didn't carry the news so much as give it a community focus, good or bad, functioning as street-corner sermons, cautionary tales, or just plain gossip given melody. Some of these songs are straight observational narratives, but some of them have definite agendas.