The Rough Guide to Bottleneck Blues

You could say that bottleneck, or slide, guitar embodies the dichotomy at the heart of the blues. On the one hand, it's the direct musical approximation of a human being weeping in pain. On the other hand, it's a faintly ridiculous noise: a mocking joke, a raising of the eyebrows. That's the blues all over: an art-form that bemoans a terrible situation, but does so with wit, self-deprecation and a mordant punchline at the end of each verse.

There's a wonderful breadth of personality heard across these 25 songs, all sourced from the late 1920s to mid-30s. ‘Frisco Blues’, a beautiful instrumental by Bayless Rose shows how slide can be extremely graceful, a bittersweet foil to his rippling fingerpicking. In complete contrast, Barbecue Bob batters his guitar with virile fanfares that bolster his gutsy vocals on ‘It's Just Too Bad’. Lemuel Turner's ‘Jake Bottle Blues’ is a haunting instrumental that conjures up visions of Southern sunsets. Then there's the primitive gospel trance of ‘You Never Will Know Who is Your Friend’, by the Rev Edward W Clayborn, a kind of ‘one-bar blues.’ Some famous names feature – Bukka White, Son House and Leadbelly – but it's the mavericks that stand out. The compiler, Neil Record, has done an excellent job in picking unusual tracks that even connoisseurs may not have heard before, but never for obscurity's sake; always in the name of good music.