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ROOTS N' BLUES: THE RETROSPECTIVE 1925-1950 is an absolutely terrific collection of American folk music which deserves to be better known than it is. The 107 tracks, many previously reissued, come from the archives of Columbia Records' location recording program. This was a marketing scheme started by Columbia and its subsidiary labels such as Vocalion and Okeh in which recording teams were sent to various parts of the U.S. to record locally popular musicians. The masters were then brought to a central Columbia plant for processing, and the disks pressed from them would be shipped back to the region of the original recording for marketing to the local audience. The result of this commercial process is an artistic treasure house of wonderfully authentic American traditional music, including both famous names and unknowns, some of the latter being as good as the more famous artists. The title is slightly misleading: though there are plenty of blues here, the selections actually range widely over traditional American musical genres, including folk, gospel, bluegrass, old-timey fiddle, early country, and even cowboy. One advantage of this anthology is that unlike many it gives equal prominence to both black and white musicians, and thus illustrates the musical influence that ran both ways despite the rigid racial segregation of the times.

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