Show 46: Alphabet Blues, Pt. 6: Document

I'm your host. For today's 46th episode of the CC Blues Show, we will be resuming our Alphabet Blues series, where I aim to spin, for you, every single musically significant blues label. Last week we started the D's with the St. Louis and Chicago label Delmark Records, and we've got another episode today that's filled to the brim with just one starting label, and it's a doozy. Document Records, which began in 1985, had a guiding mission of recovering, restoring, and re-releasing, in chronological order, the complete recorded works of Afro-American artists whose recordings were made on cylinders and 78 RPM records from the 1890s to the mid-twentieth century. These recordings are primarily blues, gospel, jazz, spirituals, and sermons. It was through these Document Records that yours truly truly fell in love with the blues, as each album is presented in chronological order with scholarly notes and full discographic details. It is an ongoing undertaking unlike any other, comprising over thirty thousand titles. One of my favorite blues artists, Big Bill Broonzy, has an extensive set of volumes released by Document Records, with over a dozen compilation albums following him from his days working shows in the 1920s with Papa Charlie Jackson, who we'll hear later, to his lofty perch as one of the most influential blues artists of the century, with the perfect poise and style he projected in his recordings during the late 1950s. Up first is Broonzy at the height of his musical and vocal powers, from 1938. Here's "Truckin' Little Woman," followed by Robert Lee Westmoreland's "Hello Central, Give Me 209," and subsequent to that'll be Big Boy Crudup, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny Boy Williamson I, and Blind Lemon Jefferson.