Blues Records 1943-1970 Volume One: A to K – Mike Leadbitter & Neil Slaven

Description

Blues Records 1943-1970, a Selective Discography – Volume One A to K, by Mike Leadbitter & Neil Slaven / 798 pp. , hardcover, Record Information Services, 1987. New old stock books.

“British discographers Mike Leadbitter and Neil Slaven, both key figures in promoting and documenting the blues in the 1960s, illuminated the blues world’s esoteric corner of the post-World War II recording industry with the invaluable publication Blues Records 1943-1966 in 1968. Gathering whatever data they could from collectors, musicians, producers, trade publications, liner notes, and record company files, Leadbitter and Slaven compiled 381 pages worth of session data on all the blues artists they could discover who made records in the 1943-66 era. The prewar years had been covered by Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich in Blues and Gospel Records 1902-1942, and despite the fact that Leadbitter and Slaven were dealing with more recent recordings, many of them still on the market at the time, they faced a far more difficult task. The great majority of prewar blues was recorded by major labels and could be fairly well documented through industry sources and official company logs and ledgers; but blues recording changed drastically after the war with the rise of independent labels, many of them one-man operations or small family businesses, each operating with its own system (or lack thereof) of recordkeeping.

With the best information available at the time, Leadbitter, Slaven, and the many collectors and amateur discographers who contributed, did a monumental job in documenting the works of both the famous (Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, et al.) and the obscure ( no-hit wonders like Cab McMillan & His Fadeaways, Monister Parker and Emma Dell Lee). Performers whose music was deemed more in the rhythm & blues vein, such as Bobby Bland and Little Milton, were withheld for a future volume. Each session lists artist credits, song titles, matrix numbers, record labels, release numbers, names of sidemen and instruments played, and recording dates and locations, or at least as much of this as could be determined. Revisions and additions continued to be gathered after the book appeared, although Leadbitter did not live to see any of the greatly expanded subsequent editions. This edition of Blues Records 1943-1970, Volume One, by Leadbitter and Slaven, was published in 1987.”

–Jim O’Neal
www.bluesoterica.com