GARFIELD AKERS' COTTONFIELD BLUES PART 2

Newish friends asked us to come to dinner last Saturday and to bring with us our Desert Island Discs  -  our all-time favourite five tracks (eight each would have proved unwieldy for one evening). Of course it was an impossible task, but here's one of my five, chosen without hesitation. As I wrote of this track in Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan:

Garfield Akers’ ‘Cottonfield Blues’, especially the transcendent ‘Part 2’, comes across as the birth of rock’n’roll... from 1929! It’s also as incantatory as buddhist chanting or as Van Morrison’s ‘Madame George’... Yet it isn’t that the pre-war blues are proto-rock’n’roll that makes them so uplifting, exciting and vivid. The experience of the encounter is comparable; and the music may hold some of the main ingredients that rock’n’roll returned us to using - but the pre-war blues is a liberation and an enrichment because it’s different, not merely more of the same. These old blues are at once thrillingly exotic and our common heritage.

Here it is (and play it loud):

Thanks to zenguitarblues for having posted this on YouTube