Living Chicago Blues – Vols. 1-6

Sometime in the around 1991, I picked up a CD on Alligator, “Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 4.” Most likely I got it at the old Records ‘n’ Such in Stuyvesant Plaza, which had a pretty nice blues selection. That CD introduced me to the great blues of Detroit Junior (“If I Hadn’t Been High” – one of the all-time greats), Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, Queen Sylvia Embry, Big Leon Brooks’ Blues Harp Band, and Andrew Brown. One of my all-time favorite collections – but Volume 4 was the only volume I ever saw, so I didn’t get to expand on the series.

So I was absolutely thrilled when my local record store, Forever Changes, got a substantial blues collection in last summer (2024), and I saw that it included six (all six!) vinyl editions of the series. I immediately asked to have those set aside for me.

I was surprised to find this series was actually originally released on vinyl in 1980-81, and I was also surprised to find that Volume 4 on CD had nothing to do with Volume 4 on vinyl!

No indeed, these vinyl volumes are organized quite differently from the CDs. No matter – they’re just one blues gem after another, both by well-known artists and many I’d never heard of. Such a great collection. I decided to lump them all together into one post, though, as there’s no sense in covering each one individually at this point – I just haven’t had that much time with them.