KTRU pickin'-of-the-week: Joe Bussard's Desperate Man Blues

By Rose Cahalan     1/29/09 6:00pm

Every week at KTRU, eager DJs scribble out short reviews of music's cutting-edge albums. KTRU's Music Department uses these reviews to judge the quality of the albums it receives and to provide information for the DJs who play them. Each week, a DJ polishes one of these reviews so that KTRU's riches can shine for the larger Rice community.Desperate Man Blues is a compilation of 1920s and '30s American roots music released concurrently with a documentary of the same name. Both are based on the immense collection of Joe Bussard, a 72-year-old Maryland man who has spent his life amassing over 25,000 vintage 78-RPM early Americana records, many of which are the only known copies in existence.

To put that figure in perspective, KTRU's music library, filling two rooms and overflowing into a third, has an estimated 30,000 total albums. Bussard's collection, then, is surely among the largest personal libraries of its kind - and the 19 tracks on this CD are a broad and engaging selection of his favorites.

The album tells two stories: one is the complex co-evolution of such genres as blues, ragtime and gospel, and the other is the remarkable personal history of Bussard himself. After buying his first record at age 10, Bussard went on to spend decade after decade scouring backwoods Appalachian shacks and country stores in search of dusty vinyl gold to file away in his library.

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This compulsion for hoarding music is matched only by his fervent desire to share it with anyone who will listen. As a teen, Bussard started an illegal radio station in his basement, and today the septuagenarian hosts no fewer than four radio shows on community airwaves. This is his second project with the excellent Atlanta-based archivist label Dust to Digital, the first being a retrospective of his now-defunct label, Fonotone.

Though Bussard's dedication to one specific era is undeniably cultish ("I don't like anything made after the '30s. Rock music is garbage straight from hell," he grumps on - somewhat ironically - his Myspace page), the breadth and variety of this album will surprise listeners.

Rollicking opener "We Live A Long Time to Get Old," from Alabama crooner Jimmy Murphy, follows a typical, twanging banjo melody with the cheeky narrative of an old man seemingly thrilled with his looming mortality: "So there ain't no need to cry / grandpa's got to die!"

Next, Robert Johnson performs "Cross Roads Blues," one of surprisingly few standard 12-bar blues songs on the CD. Maybe Bussard would revise his opinion that rock is "the cancer of all music" were he reminded that Johnson, nicknamed the grandfather of rock 'n' roll, has heavily influenced rockers ranging from The Rolling Stones to Jack White.

Indeed, fans of modern rock will find much to recognize in Desperate Man Blues: Johnson's hard-edged but emotive singing voice, Son House's first crushing slide guitar note in "Death Letter Blues." The majority of Joe Hill Louis' "When I'm Gone," which Bussard introduces with an awed "Kid, this is way out," is a red-hot, improvised electric solo that could be Jimi Hendrix - until Louis' bluesy wail comes in to remind listeners that Hendrix won't be around for a few more decades.

Moments like these, when historical changes crystallize clearly for modern listeners, are what make the album shine. They also elevate one man's music library from eccentric stockpile to indispensable cultural archive, though listeners won't realize they've just received an extensive aural education in American music history until after they stop smiling at the soulful vocals and blazing riffs. Desperate Man Blues is available for $15 on Dust to Digital's website (dust-digital.com) and comes highly recommended.

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