If Scorsese skimps on the British blues in his box set, he compensates with a single spin-off disc focusing solely on Slowhand's contribution to the devil's music. Ten tracks trace Clapton's development through his days with John Mayall to Cream, Blind Faith and Derek And The Dominos. We also get "Rockin' Today" from the famous 1970 London sessions with Howlin' Wolf. There's nothing of more recent vintage, such as his 2001 collaboration with BB King. But it's still an impressive summary of Clapton's credentials as—surely—the greatest white blues man of them all.
Look closely at the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and you'll see a copy of Robert Johnson's King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Released in 1961 but recorded a quarter of a century earlier, the Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered it for source material, making it arguably the single most influential album on '60s rock. All 29 sides recorded by Johnson in his short lifetime are included here, and if you don't already own them, now's your chance. That they come with a second disc rounding up 25 of Johnson's contemporaries from Bessie Smith to Son House is a bonus.
When Moby sampled Vera Ward Hall's "Trouble So Hard", he was merely the latest in a long line of musicians to use as a source the field recordings made in the Deep South between 1933 and 1959 by the folklorist Alan Lomax. The Popular Songbook collects together 22 such tracks and, perhaps to your surprise, you'll find you know almost every one of them—if not in these original versions then in covers by artists as diverse as Clapton, Miles Davis, Steve Miller, Dylan, Led Zep and The Grateful Dead. File alongside the Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music.
