The album collects sixteen mono recordings, nine of which were previously available as 78 rpm records on the Vocalion label, which Johnson recorded during two sessions in 1936 and 1937. The records sold well in their target market of the American south and southwest, with "Terraplane Blues" a regional hit, but their sales figures never totaled more than 5000 or so.[2] Legendary record producer, John Hammond gave an advance copy of the album to his newest signing to Columbia, Bob Dylan, who had never heard of Johnson and who became mesmerized by the intensity of the recordings.[3][4]
Hammond, who had searched for Johnson in 1938 to include him on the bill for the first of his From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall, prodded Columbia to assemble this album during the height of the folk revival in the 1960s. It was among the first of the retrospective albums of folk, country, and blues artists of the 1920s and 1930s who were rediscovered in the wake of that revival, some of whom were located and invited to appear at events such as the Newport Folk Festival. Johnson's LP failed to make the charts, but the quality of his music was recognized and Johnson's reputation grew. The album became a badge of hip taste in the 1960s, evidenced by its appearance in the album cover photo to Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home amid other emblems of counter-culture life.[5]
Release
The album was originally released by Columbia Records in 1961 as a monoLP. At the time of its release very little scholarship had been done on Johnson's life, and the album liner notes contain some inaccuracies and false conclusions, and a speculative portrait of Johnson's personality. As the two surviving portraits of him were discovered a decade later, the cover painting depicts a faceless musician in field clothes.
The album was followed in 1970 by King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. II, including the remaining recordings at that time available by Johnson not on this record. King of the Delta Blues Singers was reissued on September 15, 1998, by the Legacy Records subsidiary label of the Sony Corporation, with a newly discovered alternate version of "Traveling Riverside Blues" appended as a bonus track. The original recording engineer was Vincent Liebler.
The Los Angeles Times wrote that Johnson's recordings for the albums "revolutionized the Mississippi Delta style that became the foundation of the Chicago blues sound".[17]The Wall Street Journal wrote that "when his album King of the Delta Blues Singers made its belated way to England in the mid-1960s, it energized a generation of musicians".[15]
In 1980, King of the Delta Blues Singers became the first album to be inducted by the Blues Foundation into the Blues Hall of Fame.[18]The Hartford Courant selected King of the Delta Blues Singers for its list of the 25 Pivotal Recordings That Defined Our Times (1999).[19] In 2003, the album was ranked number 27 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,[20] with its ranking dropping to number 374 on the 2020 update of the list.[21] (The album was not included in the 2012 version of the Rolling Stone list, instead being replaced by The Complete Recordings at number 22.)[22]Mojo magazine ranked it number six on its list of 100 Records That Changed the World (2007).[23]
^Marmorstein, Gary. The Label: The Story of Columbia Records. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press: 2006; p. 87. ISBN1-56025-707-5
^Dylan describes the impact the Johnson recordings made on him in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, (2004), pp. 281-288
^Mamorstein, p. 309. In 1959, the Johnson song "Preachin' Blues" was included on the compilation The Country Blues on Folkways RF1.
^Miller, James. Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977. Simon & Schuster (1999), p. 185. ISBN0-684-80873-0. The LP is visible between Bob Dylan and Sally Grossman in the front jacket photo.
