Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963-1968 ( AUDIO CD )

Dock Boggs champions will look back at 1998 as a monumental year for the Virginia-born banjo-playing songster who, but for a few years in the late '20s and the early '60s, lived in obscurity. His first recordings have been beautifully reissued in Revenant's Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings package. His shadow looms over Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic--the critic's best book since Mystery Train. And Smithsonian Folkways has brought back 50 recordings made by Mike Seeger during the autumn of Boggs's life. Together with the Revenant material, this two-CD reissue--including a brilliant essay by Barry O'Connell--details one of the most mysterious voices in American music. When Boggs sings he tears each line to pieces and, in turn, the language of his death-obsessed blues rends his voice into a scratchy, painful tremolo. This is not folk music for the timid. "Oh, I've got no sugar baby now," he wails in one of his best-known songs. "It's all I can do for to see peace with you / And I can't get along this-a-way." Along with celebrated material from the '20s, Boggs also chose for these '60s sessions a few gospel tunes, which are sung with the revealing intensity. And on every track, even on the shaky, jagged instrumentals, Boggs captures the darkest and resiliency of a man's soul.

CONDITION: NEW, Marked UPC

TRACK LISTING

Disc: 1

1 Down South Blues
2 Country Blues
3 Pretty Polly
4 Coal Creek March
5 My Old Horse Died
6 Wild Bill Jones
7 Rowan County Crew
8 New Prisoner's Song
9 Oh, Dear
10 Prodigal Son
11 Mother's Advice
12 Drunkard's Lone Child
13 Bright Sunny South
14 Mistreated Mama Blues
15 Harvey Logan
16 Mixed Blues
17 Old Joe's Barroom
18 Danville Girl
19 Cole Younger
20 Schottische Time
21 Papa, Build Me A Beat
22 Little Black Train
23 No Disappointment In Heaven
24 Glory Land

Disc: 2

1 Banjo Clog
2 Wise County Jail
3 Sugar Baby
4 The Death Of Jerry Damron
5 Railroad Tramp
6 Poor Boy In Jail
7 Brother Jim Got Shot
8 John Henry
9 Davenport
10 Dying Ranger
11 Little Omie Wise
12 Sugar Blues
13 Loving Nancy
14 Cuba
15 John Hardy
16 Peggy Walker
17 I Hope I Live A Few More Days
18 Turkey In The Straw
19 Calvary
20 Roses While I'm Living
21 Leave It There
22 Prayer Of A Miner's Child
23 Coke Oven March
24 Ruben's Train
25 Cumberland Gap
26 Careless Love