Various The Rough Guide To Hillbilly Blues (LP, Ltd.)

(Rough Guide) 13 tracks, limited edition + download card.

This album shows how much early white country musicians were influenced by the blues. It includes many forgotten gems by artists who are obscure, as well as tracks by early country pioneers Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Poole and Dock Boggs. It explores the incredible musical interchange between black and white musical cultures in the development of the blues, and features fascinating bottleneck and fingerstyle blues guitar playing.

When country blues was first recorded in the mid-1920s, it was played and appreciated not only by African Americans, but also by white musicians and listeners. At that time, it was common for record companies to divide the music of the American South into two categories: the "race" series, aimed at a black audience, and the "hillbilly" series, aimed at a white audience.

This separation by race was actually superficial, as black and white musicians had much in common in terms of genre and repertoire, and the separation of the two on commercial recordings arose from record company bias. It is often overlooked that there was much musical exchange and interaction between white and black musicians at this time.