Late last month, Mississippi label Fat Possum, in collaboration with online retailer Amazon, released “Worried Blues,” a 10-album series of “rare, lost, and out-of-print recordings from … towering figures of 20th Century blues." This includes titles by Delta and Hill Country legends like R.L. Burnside, Reverend Gary Davis, Honeyboy Edwards, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Furry Lewis, Little Brother Montgomery, Houston Stackhouse, Bukka White and Reverend Robert Wilkins.

It seems unlikely, if not impossible, that in 2017 there should be such a trove of largely unheard material from the old blues masters, but according to Fat Possum general manager Bruce Watson, “Worried Blues” is just the first sampling of the archives of Gene Rosenthal, a Maryland-based blues scholar and owner of Adelphi Records.

Last year, Fat Possum purchased a massive collection of audio and video material from Rosenthal. “His Adelphi label released a lot of stuff over the years, from folk to reggae, but we basically bought all the blues field recordings he did,” Watson says. “Most of the stuff was never released; it’s just been sitting there for 40, 50 years.”

Rosenthal, initially with the help of musicologist/guitarist John Fahey, began making recordings of unknown or forgotten blues singers starting in the early ‘60s. “Rosenthal was a guy from Silver Spring, Maryland, the son of a doctor, who had a recording studio in his house,” Watson says. “Through Fahey, he starting hanging with these blues guys and doing field recordings of guys like Bukka White, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt.”

As the notes to “Worried Blues” recount, Rosenthal and Fahey “came upon these artists through word-of-mouth tips, hopeful searches, and cosmic kismet.” For Skip James the recordings would represent his first work on wax since the 1930s. Bukka White was located after “a nondescript letter from Fahey sent to ‘Booker T. Washington White (Old Blues Singer)’ with no address miraculously made its way into the right hands.”

Some of the “Worried Blues” tracks saw a limited release on CD in the early 1990s via Rosenthal’s Gene’s Blues Vault imprint. But the collaboration between Fat Possum and Amazon means the music will be getting a wider airing at last.

“Amazon reached out to us and said they’d love to do something with us, just as we were I the process of buying this catalog,” Watson says. “We thought it was a partnership that made perfect sense.” The 10 titles are available now digitally and via CD on demand through Amazon, with vinyl editions set for release in September.

What is perhaps most tantalizing, however, is what has yet to be released from the Rosenthal archive. The next project Fat Possum is planning is a film of the landmark 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival. While a short public television special of the fest shot by New York’s WNET has been screened before — including last fall at the Levitt Shell — Rosenthal shot all three days of the festival, totaling 18-plus hours of footage.

“He shot all day and night on Friday and Saturday, and Sunday was a daytime gospel thing. None of it has ever been seen before,” Watson says. “Johnny Winter was the headliner, the Bar-Kays were on the bill, along with Mississippi Fred McDowell, Furry Lewis, Reverend John Wilkins, and all these amazing gospel bands you’ve never heard of. The footage is just out of this world.”

Fat Possum plans to build the material into a feature-length concert film. “We’ve transferred all the film and audio, synced up about 90 percent of it, and we’re working with some filmmakers in L.A. to put it together. We’re hoping to release it in 2018,” adds Watson, noting the release of the film also will include an accompanying soundtrack.

The Rosenthal archives go ever further, as he made a visit to Memphis in 1970, setting up at the Peabody Hotel and recording a whole other contingent of artists, from notable names like Mose Vinson to lesser-known artists including Van Hunt, Walter Miller and Elder Morris.

Watson says there’s even more music in the archive that they’ve yet to properly explore and catalog. “We’ve only touched the Memphis and Mississippi part of it. Because he did the same thing in other cities; he went to Chicago, he went to St. Louis. And there are a lot of other live recordings that we haven’t even gotten to. We’ve got 150 tapes. It’s a pretty remarkable collection of stuff that we’re going to be developing over a long time.”



