Revisited

Revisited is a double-disc of live Son House recordings from the Mississippi delta blues legend's twilight years on the folk revival circuit. Disc one is a mid-'60s performance at Oberlin College; after a scholarly introduction by his then-manager Dick Waterman, House starts out in fine form, prefacing each song with long, discursive monologues that touch on a variety of topics. Highlights include terrific versions of his signature songs "Death Letter" and "Levee Camp Moan," but there's also a couple of extended tracks that wander fruitlessly, the nadir being the 10-minute "Son's Blues," a disjointed, tuneless mumble that sounds like House, a notorious imbiber, was half off his head. Disc two, recorded in 1965 at New York's Gaslite, suffers from very poor sound quality, and the performances tend more toward the distracted and half-baked. These discs are a belated official release of two long bootlegged concerts, but while the sound quality is improved (especially on the first disc), it can't be called genuinely good. With that caveat, fans will find this a worthwhile historical curio. ~ Stewart Mason