Angola Prisoners' Blues

VINYL FORMAT. Import; on 180 gram vinyl! In 1959, a young folklorist and musicologist, Harry Oster, traveled to the State Prison in Angola, Louisiana to collect folksongs. He made a number of field recordings while at the prison, but his biggest discovery was undoubtedly the Louisiana Blues Hall of Famer, Robert Pete Williams, a truly gifted musician and blues writer who was serving a life sentence. Of the nine songs on this album, four are by Williams, who sings heart-wrenchingly about prison life and being down and out. Thanks to Oster, Williams was eventually released from prison, and was able to have a fairly successful career as a bluesman in the 60s and 70s, appearing at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and touring the US and Europe. The other musicians featured here, fellow inmates Robert "Guitar" Welch and Matthew "Hogman" Maxey, are both extremely gifted musicians, but in the words of Dr. Oster (who would go on to write the Penguin Guide to American Folklore in 2000), "they are primarily the heirs of a clearly defined and standardized blues tradition, rather than innovators." In any case, this is acoustic prison blues at its finest.