THE BLUES ROOTS OF ELVIS PRESLEY

When I first started to develop a serious interest in the blues, I stumbled about listening to the more well known names - Muddy Waters, B B King and perhaps a little Robert Johnson. And it wasn't until I caught the excellent Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues series that I started to get more adventurous in my listening.

From there it was back to the founding fathers - the Ledbelly's, that Howling Wolf guy, the Ivory Joe Hunter's and Blind Willie's. I sampled differing styles - Delta Blues, Piano Blues, slide blues, Chicago Blues and just about every variety there was. I learned of the lives of people like Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Little Walter and Charley Patton - some of these guys lived lives as mournful as any blues number!

A great and inexpensive way to build a comprehensive blues collection is to buy the CD's in the Complete Blues collection from Snapper Music. They are uniformly designed and look great side by side on the shelf and cover pretty much everything from the early days of the wandering bluesman to the rock/blues hybrids of modern day.

Each disc also comes with a booklet with an essay relating to the relevant artist or blues style.

"Elvis Presley was the white guy who sang black, the man who thrust the bare wires of the blues and country together and created a power surge called rock and roll that the world has never recovered from."

The Blues roots of Elvis Presley is one of the releases in the collection and it collects together 21 of the numbers that influenced Presley's formative years. Many of the songs featured here were later recorded by Presley and it's great to listen to early versions of such classics as Blue Moon of Kentucky, See See Rider Blues and Milk Cow Blues. Jimi Rodgers original Frankie and Johnny shows clearly that this was one song Presley murdered but Wynonnie Harris' Good Rocking Tonight showed how Presley nailed the number. Some of the tracks featured on this collection are more raw country than blues but as Johnny Cash said, country is the white man's blues.

The inlay essay is written by Michael Heatley.