None of the albums on this holiday gift checklist for roots music lovers showed up on Billboard’s pop charts, yet the blues remains one of America’s most enduring, influential, and supremely entertaining musical forms more than 100 years after its birth. The soul, depth, beauty, and adventurousness of these 2007-released CDs illustrate why.
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Our best blues picks for the year are: Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (ANTI-) This flashback to the classic Muscle Shoals sound is driven by LaVette’s dynamic silk-and-sandpaper singing, which turns numbers like 'Jealousy' and 'You Don’t Know Me At All' into epic soul testimonials. Upping the ante, LaVette teamed with gritty Southern rockers Drive-By Truckers, whose spare, muscular playing proved a perfect match for the ’60s R&B survivor’s sinewy approach. FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD: Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, Hope Radio (Stony Plain) This reclusive six-string virtuoso has always been best live, and this concert before a studio audience is a brilliant, soulful return to form. There’s no better contemporary essayist in taste, tone, and tension than Earl.