Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: The Best of the Blues

1	Cross Road Blues / Robert "P-Nut" Johnson 2:39
2	Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan) / Bessie Smith 3:08
3	Devil Got My Woman / Skip James 3:00
4	Evil (Is Going On) / Howlin' Ron Wolf 2:53
5	(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man / Muddy Waters 2:50
6	Boom Boom / John Lee Hooker 2:32
7	Death Letter Blues / Son House 4:21
8	Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I) / Ray Charles 2:54
9	I'd Rather Go Blind / Etta James 2:35
10	The Thrill Is Gone / B.B. King 5:25
11	All Your Love / John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers 3:34
12	One Good Man / Janis Joplin 4:10
13	Red House / The Jimi Hendrix Experience 3:51
14	One Way Out / The Allman Brothers Band Live 4:59
15	Pride and Joy / Stevie Ray Vaughan 3:40
16	Am I Wrong / Keb' Mo' 2:19
17	Just Won't Burn / Susan Tedeschi 4:44
18	Voodoo Music / Los Lobos 3:22
19	Vietnam Blues / Cassandra Wilson 4:32
20	Round and Round / Bonnie Raitt 3:40
21	I Pity the Fool / Shemeika Copeland Live 5:01

Barnes & Noble

There’s a quote you might be hearing a great deal in this “Year of the Blues” (2003). “The blues are the roots,” said the legendary songwriter Willie Dixon. “Everything else is the fruits.” Proving Dixon’s point -- once again -- is this compact collection, which brings together some of the classic blues artists with their rock 'n' rolling progeny. And even a handful of finely chosen selections from the early blues figures is enough to point out how the blues form became the model for later R&B and pop music. The open emotionality of such giants as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bessie Smith can also be clearly heard in blues-loving rockers like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Bonnie Raitt. A slew of recent artists that reflect a strong blues influence -- Keb’ Mo’, Cassandra Wilson, and Susan Tedeschi among them -- make telling appearances as well. Although it just whets the appetite for more blues and blues-rock, you can’t go wrong with killer cuts including “The Thrill Is Gone,” “Red House,” “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “I’d Rather Go Blind” -- each a high point of American vernacular music. William Pearl

All Music Guide

A massive media campaign comprising seven documentary films broadcast on public television and released as a DVD box set, plus accompanying soundtrack albums, a 13-part radio series, a companion book, 12 individual artist compilations, and a five-CD box set, The Blues, executive produced by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, threatened to be even more all-pervasive than Ken Burns' Jazz project, after which it was clearly patterned. And you might say it all boiled down to this single-disc distillation, which draws upon the vaults of major labels Universal and Sony. Even if all of that other material didn't make it clear, the absurdity of reducing the blues to a one-hour, 17-track album would be obvious anyway. But the way one judges this disc may depend upon whether it is trying to be "the best of the blues" or "the best of 'The Blues.'" It hasn't much hope of being the former, but as a one-CD sampler of the five-CD set, it does just fine. At the very least, it contains many indisputably classic blues performances by some of the indisputably major blues artists. Purists may object reasonably that it covers a very wide range, from the rural blues of Robert Johnson to the Southern rock of the Allman Brothers Band and the -- what can one call it? -- designer blues of Keb' Mo'. But that is in keeping with the series of films on which the five-CD set and this highlights disc are based. If the album doesn't really work as a collection, despite the individual talents and performances included, that may suggest that "the blues" has long-since become an umbrella term covering many different musical styles, not all of which work well together. And that only demonstrates its pervasive influence. William Ruhlmann