Bo Carter

Complete recorded Works c. November/December 1928 – 12 February 1940

Vol. 5: 22nd October 1938 to 12th February 1940

Featuring the recordings of:

Bo Carter, vocal, guitar.

Genres: Country Blues, Mississipi Blues, Country Blues Guitar, National Guitar

Abridged from this album’s original booklet notes Bo Carter was still touring the South with the Mississippi Sheiks in the years 1930 through 1935. This activity took the band through Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and as far north as Illinois and New York. During this period Bo’s eyesight got progressively worse and he eventually went blind sometime in the 1930s. This ensuing blindness and the disbanding of the Sheiks led Carter to concentrate on his solo recordings. On October 22, 1938 he had his longest session ever, recording eighteen titles in one day, all but one of them issued. This session produced some of his most advanced music from a structural and harmonic standpoint. Let’s Get Drunk Again and Some Day contained some ordinary blues and rag chord progressions structurally utilized in a manner suggesting pop music, and yet the finger picking approach was firmly in the blues mode with some stunning blues riffing in between verses. Both songs also had interesting harmonic bridges that further removed them from mainstream blues. There are also delightfully archaic pieces like Old Devil, taken at a manic pace, and Be My Salty Dog with its suggestion of John Hurt‘s “Candy Man Blues” and Willie Brown‘s “Future Blues” in the figure played in between verses on the bass strings of the guitar. Bo Carter was a veritable encyclopedia of Mississippi blues styles, and then some. At his last session cut in Atlanta on February 12, 1940 he recorded fourteen tracks with twelve being issued. There was less of a divergence from straight blues at this session, but Bo Carter still knew how to put an original stamp on any blues he recorded. Border Of New Mexico Blues is a version of “Kokomo Blues” first recorded by Madlyn Davis as “Kokola Blues” (a mistitling by Paramount) in 1927, and popularized by Kokomo Arnold as “Old Original Kokomo Blues”, and Robert Johnson as “Sweet Home Chicago”. He finished the date with Honey and What You Want Your Daddy To Do?, two eccentric tracks somewhat similar to Some Day (recorded at the previous session).

Ken Romanowski Copyright 1991 Document Records

DOCD-5082