Various Artists – American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939)
In which a song about soda pop (the Nugrape Twins’ “I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape”) begins as a hymn and ends as an exorcism; Two Poor Boys contemplate death on “Two White Horses In A Line” and “John Henry Blues” and simply jive it away on “Old Hen Cackle” and “Take A Look At That Baby”; 1920s country artist John Hammond all but says “Purty Polly” got just what she deserved; Henry Spaulding’s guitar on “Cairo Blues” establishes him as the acoustic Ike Turner; and Geeshie Wiley, whether singing or playing guitar or both, with or without Elvie Thomas, is God. And that’s just for starters. Wiley — whose guitar tour-de-force “Last Kind Word Blues” was featured in the documentary film Crumb, adding to a mythstique in blues circles that’s approaching Robert Johnson’s — is possibly the only artist on these two discs you’ve even heard of, and is featured on six tracks. In several instances, an artist is represented by the only two sides he ever recorded. I’m as skeptical as the next guy about the basic premise of this set, programmed by the late John Fahey: that the more obscure a record is, the better it is likely to be. But this marvelous stuff is like the reflection of the mirror image of the underbelly of a parallel universe — supremely weird, supremely unsettling, supremely joyful and supremely great by most any standards. It’s made a believer out of me.