Robert Pete Williams

2 CD Expanded Version Of The Classic “Louisana Blues” Album Plus Previously Unreleased Studio & Live Tracks.      

"The most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded. No punk rock band has ever matched the jagged acerbic fury of the riffs Williams played 35 years ago. No rapper has approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman” - New York Times

Over 60 years since his discovery by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen in the prison farm of Angola, Louisiana, what is it that makes the blues as sung and picked out by Robert Pete Williams such a singular listening experience, unequaled elsewhere in that musical form? As Peter Guralnick, in his Feel Like Going Home book writes: "It's difficult to approve the banalities of most blues singers after listening to Robert Pete Williams." The first ten tracks on this album were recorded in July 1966 in Berkeley for under the supervision of John Fahey for his Takoma imprint.  The live tracks were recorded in France during the summer of 1977 and Disc 2, studio recordings were done in a marathon session in Italy in 1978, and never released outside of Europe.