The Roosevelt Sykes Collection 1929-47

Roosevelt Sykes was a hugely popular and influential exponent of the rollicking barrel-house style of blues piano playing and songwriting whose core career spanned the decades spanning WWII. Recording initially under a variety of names, and finding his greatest popularity when he adopted the soubriquet ‘The Honeydripper’, he recorded a substantial body of work variously for the Okeh, Decca and RCA Victor labels, which included classics of the genre like “The Honeydripper”, “Night Time Is The Right Time”, “44 Blues”, “Boot That Thing” and “Driving Wheel Blues”. This great value 75-track 3-CD set selects material from across those key decades of his career from his earliest recordings through to the time when he began to be overtaken by the new electric blues in the late ‘40s. It includes solo recordings along with those as a duo with a drummer, and, in the later years, with a variety of small groups in a much more R&B-flavoured style.