With an elegant piano style and a smooth voice that made him sound a little bit like a gruffer Nat King Cole, Charles Brown's jazz-tinged blues is the perfect music for a late-night wind-down. Unfortunately, as this disc of late sides cut for Aladdin Records shows, much of his material worked from the same template, an unhurried tempo that, although effective in small doses, just sort of blends together over the long haul, so much so that when the midtempo "Gee!" hits here at the middle of the set, it almost feels like speed metal. Still, this is a worthwhile compilation, because what Brown did well, he did very well, and underneath everything was that wonderful, jazzy piano style, which was central to the sound of West Coast blues. ~ Steve Leggett

There are a couple of names here, like Memphis Minnie and Lucille Bogan, that will be familiar to fans of the early blues on this interesting collection of female blues singers who recorded between 1923 and 1930, but most of these singers will be unknown to all but the most serious blues scholars and collectors. Most of them recorded sparingly, often cutting only the two sides of a single 78, before vanishing into the mists of history, remaining now only as vocal ghosts in the digital glow of the 21st century. Those voices, however, remain amazingly powerful, and the honest coarseness and barely veiled sexual themes of these songs is oddly refreshing and hopeful, and the directness of some of these sides seems bold even by today's standards. The little-known Margaret Johnson is a case in point. Her two-sided 78, which included the to-the-point-and-suffer-no-fools "Dead Drunk Blues," a song that could only be called a blues dirge, and the bright-sounding (but not really) "Second-Handed Blues," explores the universal themes of the wages and costs of love with all the subtlety of a hammer thrown through a pane of glass. The directness is startling, revealing, redemptive, and even a little frightening. In other words, it's everything the blues should be. ~ Steve Leggett