The Best Blues Albums of the '60s

Bob Koester's Delmark label let a working Chicago band cut a whole LP in 1965, when blues still lived on singles — and Buddy Guy played guitar billed as 'Friendly Chap' to dodge his Chess contract. Snatch It Back and Hold It opens it lean and funky, Wells's amplified harp jabbing around the beat instead of over it. Spotify's edition is the 1991 Delmark CD, dated 1991, with studio chatter appended.

Stax put Booker T. & the M.G.'s and the Memphis Horns behind Albert King, and the title song came from Booker T. Jones and William Bell. Born Under a Bad Sign runs on that staff-written Memphis groove while King bends one string further than most players get with three. Clapton, Hendrix and Stevie Ray all lifted licks from it wholesale.

Chess answered the folk revival by unplugging its biggest star: recorded September 1963 with Willie Dixon on upright bass and a young Buddy Guy on acoustic guitar. My Home Is in the Delta is mostly air — voice, two guitars, and room echo you can hear breathing. Only the Expanded Edition exists on Spotify, appending five later electric sides to the original nine-track program.

Bill Szymczyk produced this one for BluesWay in 1969, and the closing jam became the biggest hit of King's life: The Thrill Is Gone, with Bert de Coteaux's strings hung behind that stinging minor-key vibrato. The rest runs looser than his tidy earlier records — takes were left rolling until the band found the exit on its own.

Delmark cut Sam Maghett's debut across two 1967 sessions and released it in 1968 — the definitive West Side statement, with Mighty Joe Young on second guitar. His Sweet Home Chicago rewrote Robert Johnson into the brisk shuffle arrangement every bar band on earth now plays. Tremolo-soaked and joyous; he was dead of a heart attack in December 1969, at 32. The link is the 1990 Delmark Deluxe Edition, the only official Delmark issue on Spotify.

Mike Vernon produced the record British guitarists still call the Beano album, after the comic Clapton reads on the cover. Hideaway, the Freddie King instrumental, is where the Les Paul-into-overdriven-Marshall sound got printed at LP length for the first time; Decca's engineers reportedly fought the volume and lost. Spotify's plain-titled edition appends the two Purdah single sides.

Elektra's Paul Rothchild produced the debut that put an integrated Chicago band on a folk label: Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, hired out of Howlin' Wolf's rhythm section, under Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Born in Chicago, the Nick Gravenites opener, is the starting gun for every white blues band formed in the next five years. The harp is mixed like a lead instrument because it was one.

Duke Records built this around Joe Scott's horn charts and Wayne Bennett's guitar, with Bland preaching more than shouting. I Pity the Fool went to number one on the R&B chart in 1961, and the gospel melisma he drops into it became a whole school of singing. Border case, flagged honestly: this is where blues shades into soul, and it earns both labels.

Vee-Jay backed Hooker with Detroit session men about to become Motown's Funk Brothers, and the collision works: Boom Boom is two minutes of riff, stomp and mutter that cracked the R&B top twenty and handed the Animals a hit two years later. Hooker never counted bars the same way twice; the band just watches his foot and hangs on.

Samuel Charters produced Guy's first real studio LP for Vanguard in 1968, with Otis Spann easing piano fills into every gap. One Room Country Shack is the keeper, a crawling slow blues where Guy's guitar drops to a whisper and then screams — the dynamic trick a generation of arena players borrowed. His Chess years made singles; the albums start here.

Two years after his Newport rediscovery, the Bentonia master cut this for Vanguard in that unearthly open D-minor tuning and a high, keening falsetto nobody has convincingly imitated. Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, remade some thirty-five years after his 1931 Paramount original, sounds heavier for the added age in the voice. Spotify carries only Craft's 2024 remaster, dated 2024 — no plain edition exists.

Gentleness was Hurt's whole rhetoric. Rediscovered in Avalon, Mississippi in 1963 after decades of farming, he cut this Vanguard set with the same soft, syncopated fingerpicking as his 1928 Okeh sides. Coffee Blues — the song the Lovin' Spoonful took their name from — is a quiet lesson in how little force a groove actually needs. Spotify's reissue carries a 2006 date.

Bobby Robinson's Harlem label Fire got the Houston country-blues man for one LP, and the title cut is the one everybody covers: Mojo Hand rides a single hypnotic boogie figure while Hopkins tosses off verses like he is inventing them on the spot, which he mostly was. The rest swings looser, cut fast with a small rhythm section behind him.

Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites produced Rush's first proper album at FAME in Muscle Shoals for Cotillion in 1969, setting a Chicago West Side singer against Southern soul horns. Gambler's Blues gives you the essential Rush: slow-burning left-handed guitar and a vibrato-heavy voice that cracks exactly where it should. Spotify's reissue is dated 2005; the record itself is 1969.

Cut in Paris in November 1968 and issued by Polydor, this late set won the first Grammy ever given for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording. Good Feelin' itself proves the horn-led West Coast swing he invented in the '40s was still intact — the clipped, jazzy phrasing every electric guitarist above him on this list learned from, knowingly or not.