Vintage Vinyl

Empress: The Early Electric Recordings 1925-1926
Format: CD
New: Not in stock
Wish

Formats and Editions

DISC: 1

1. Cake Walking Babies (From Home) - Fletcher Henderson's Hot Six
2. The Yellow Dog Blues - Fletcher Henderson's Hot Six
3. Soft Pedal Blues
4. Dixie Flyer Blues
5. Nashville Woman's Blues
6. Careless Love
7. J C Holmes Blues
8. I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle
9. He's Gone Blues
10. Nobody's Blues But Mine - Bessie Smith and Her Band
11. I Ain't Got Nobody and Nobody Cares for Me - Bessie Smith and Her Band
12. New Gulf Coast Blues
13. Florida Bound Blues
14. At the Christmas Ball
15. I've Been Mistreated and I Don't Like It
16. Red Mountain Blues
17. Golden Rule Blues
18. Lonesome Desert Blues
19. Them 'Has Been' Blues
20. Squeeze Me
21. What's the Matter Now?
22. I Want Ev'ry Bit of It
23. Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town
24. The Gin House Blues

More Info:

Forever the 'Empress Of The Blues', Bessie Smith was and always will remain one of the pioneering superstars of black American music. Throughout the 1920s, Bessie had few peers as a blues woman, and fewer still who could match the sales that her long string of 78s racked up. With one or sometimes two new releases a month, it would have been hard for anyone to catch her. The quality of those releases made it almost impossible. Bessie began recording in the 'acoustic' era but was one of the first artists to record using the new electrical process that was introduced in 1925. This new Jasmine CD release brings you as many of Bessie's first year of electrical recordings as a) have survived and b) we could fit into one collection. Although it doesn't include all her classics it offers a generous sampling of them among it's 24 tracks, some with just Bessie and piano accompaniment, others featuring a fine small band of musicians of a calibre that you would expect such a blues megastar to be able to work with. Inevitably there have been a number of digital compilations of Bessie's work in the 40 years since CDs came onto the market, this is the first to specifically focus on one year in the recording life of this sublime performer and to watch the evolution, from a fairly early stage, of one of the greatest blues legends of all.
        
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