I still remember reading the entry on the Mississippi Sheiks in the Rolling Stone Record Guide back when I was in graduate school. The reviewer reported, somewhat disparagingly, it seemed to me, that the black string band “catered to white audiences.” He also gave a reissue of the group’s 1930s recordings two out of a possible five stars, a rating reserved for albums that the volume’s contributors deemed “artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.” Enthralled at the time by “deep,” brooding bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Skip James and Tommy Johnson, I dismissed the Sheiks as lightweights, as an inauthentic crossover act that wasn’t worth further investigation.
It would be almost a decade later, well after I had assembled an exemplary collection of “serious” blues LPs, including several by sometime Sheiks Bo Carter and Sam Chatmon, that I finally revisited — and listened to — the band. Their version of “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” didn’t prove as riveting as the one Howlin’ Wolf cut for Chess, or as electrifying as the one Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys did for Decca. But such comparisons were beside the point, except of course that Wolf’s version, and Monroe’s, as well as those done by everyone from Bob Wills and Milton Brown to Cream and the Grateful Dead, were done, in large part, in tribute to the Sheiks and their “original.”
As this twenty-track retrospective of the band’s indispensable sides for the OKeh label attests, the Sheiks’ delightful polyglot reflected a distinctive, seemingly offhand command of most forms of the American musical vernacular, from jazz and blues to hillbilly and Tin Pan Alley favorites. Their signature — and best-selling — 1930 recording of “Sittin’” is here, along with the equally worthy likes of “Stop And Listen”, “Drivin’ That Thing”, “The Jazz Fiddler” and the title track. Also included is the riotous, cautionary double entendre of “Don’t Wake It Up”, as well as the indelible “I’ve Got Blood In My Eyes For You”, a menacing declaration revived to devastating effect by Bob Dylan on his 1993 LP World Gone Wrong (the title of another Sheiks song Dylan covered on the album).
Prominent throughout this set are the Sheiks’ genial vocals and the intuitive rapport between fiddler Lonnie Chatmon and guitarist Walter Vinson that lent the group’s swinging music its creaky, insouciant cast. Just as evident is an air of serious fun, born of the fact that this aggregation of sharecropping kin played for white audiences as much out of necessity as by choice — that is, they played the blues as lived, rather than imagined. Which mostly leaves the matter of the Sheiks’ putatively suspect crossover aesthetic, an ethos in keeping with the similarly “inauthentic” likes of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Emmett Miller.
Consumer note: This collection has very little overlap with Stop And Listen, an equally essential twenty-track compilation on Yazoo in 1992.
