Harry Smith’s monument.

Thoroughly entertaining downhome blues, intricate ragtime, hokum and instrumental guitar stomps.

The greatest gospel bluesman; one of the very greatest bottle-neck guitarists.
Almost overwhelmingly intense and gripping.

Sparkling, uproarious ragtime and blues — randy, porno and ooh-er — with Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton.
Lucille “got-fat-from-fuckin” Bogan is the filthiest of the lot: “I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb, I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come.”

Seven films shot in Mississippi between 1968 and 1975, about the diverse cultural traditions at the roots of the blues.
Black Delta, Parts I and II; Parchman Penitentiary; Give My Poor Heart Ease — Mississippi Delta Bluesmen; I Ain’t Lyin’ — Folktales from Mississippi; Made in Mississippi — Black Folk Art and Crafts; Two Black Churches.

Stokes, Memphis Minnie, Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon and co. 180g, well-pressed.

Bumptious sauce recorded for Paramount in 1929 by different lineups including Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell, Tampa Red and Blind Blake, and Bob Robinson on banjo and clarinet. Archetypal Crumb; 180g.

Awesome, rugged, hypnotic, spiritualised blues music, monumental and unmissable. Everything he did prior to his 1960s re-emergence, properly re-mastered from the 78s, with excellent notes.

45s and LPs spanning the period 1964-1973, including his long-lost album debut. The original material here trumps the folk chestnuts. Alasdair Roberts does Lord Randall a lot better, has to be said.

More than a hundred recordings — including fourteen previously unreleased tracks, and two radio shows from 1941 — housed in a hardbound 12-inch album, with a 140-page book of essays and rare photos.