BLUES
VA - Ain't Times Hard, Political and Social Comment in the Blues [2008] (4 x CDs)
Released in 2008 by UK-based JSP Records, Ain’t Times Hard is a four-CD deep-dive into the blues as a vehicle for protest, survival, and social critique. Across 100 tracks, this compilation reframes the blues not as mere lamentation, but as a coded language of resistance, documenting hunger, labor exploitation, racial injustice, and postwar disillusionment with startling clarity.
The set spans recordings from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, with CD1 anchored in pre-Depression hardship:
Big Bill Broonzy’s “Starvation Blues,” Blind Blake’s “No Dough Blues,” and King Solomon Hill’s haunting “Times Has Done Got So Hard” offer firsthand accounts of economic collapse.
These aren’t metaphorical blues, they’re dispatches from breadlines and levee camps.
CD2 and CD3 shift into the alphabet soup of New Deal-era relief: WPA, PWA, RFC, CWA. Tracks like Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Working On The Project” and Sleepy John Estes’ “Government Money” reflect both gratitude and skepticism toward federal aid. Bumble Bee Slim, Memphis Minnie, and Walter Roland appear repeatedly, their voices chronicling the tension between
hope and systemic neglect.
CD4 moves into postwar blues, where inflation, reconversion, and civil rights stir beneath the surface. Ivory Joe Hunter’s “High Cost Low Pay Blues” and J.B. Lenoir’s “Eisenhower Blues” mark a tonal shift, less pleading, more pointed.
The inclusion of Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown adds weight to the era’s growing urgency.
Rarities abound: Carrie Edwards’ “Hard Time Blues,” Sampson Pittman’s “Welfare Blues,” and Alfred Fields’ “‘29 Blues” are seldom-seen gems that elevate the set’s archival value. With sequencing that favors thematic flow over chronology, JSP’s curation is both emotionally resonant and historically rigorous, a vital document of the blues as political witness.
(Butterboy)
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