Bottleneck Blues You Can Use

Your humble correspondent is traveling the next few days, so this post will be a quick one.  Please come back next week for more blues that you can use.  In the meantime, here's a neat little album that slide guitar fans might dig that you might have missed some thirty years ago, like I did.  

A few years back, I started listening to some albums from the Testament Records catalog.  Testament was founded in 1963 by writer Pete Welding, who edited Down Beat magazine.  The label released a variety of roots music.....blues, gospel, country, and jazz until it was shut down in 1977.  Hightone Records acquired the catalog in the mid 90's and re-released nearly every album on CD, adding a few new compilations along the way.

There are a lot of fantastic recordings on Testament from artists like Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines, Otis Spann, J.B. Hutto, Robert Nighthawk, and several excellent compilations.  One that was intended for release before Testament closed up shop was Bottleneck Blues, which consists of 22 recordings, some of them field recordings made by Welding and blues scholar David Evans, who contributes the extensive liner notes for the CD.

The album showcases a variety of bottleneck guitar styles and features a few tracks from Big Joe Williams, Nighthawk, McDowell, Hutton, Shines, John Littlejohn, Napoleon Strickland (who played a one-string "jitterbug" mounted on a wall), and Honeyboy Edwards.  Some other standouts include Blind Connie Williams, and Mott Willis, who played slide with a knife, adding a bit of Hawaiian style to his slide playing.

If you want to dig deeper into traditional blues, especially slide guitar blues, Bottleneck Blues can still be easily found on Amazon or Discogs and it well worth your time.  I'm glad that Hightone made the decision to release it.  In fact, any of the Testament Records catalog is a pleasure to listen to and they're relatively easy to track down.

We will be back next week with more blues.