Jack White has announced that his Third Man Records will release the entire catalogue of Scottish blues label Document Record on vinyl.
Document Record's owns over 25,000 recordings of pre-war blues that White feels is important to have available to the public, even if he doesn't make any money with the releases. He told the BBC 6 Music:
"It's this amazing time period where lots of different things came together.
"The Depression's hitting, newly-started record companies are trying to sell records to urban people, and then they decided 'Why don't we sell records to black people in the south too? We need to record the music that they like'.
"So they brought a lot of these Blues musicians up to Chicago and Wisconsin to record and they were recording the first moments of modern music.
"This was the first time in history that a single person was writing a song about themselves and speaking to the world by themselves. A man with a guitar or a woman singing by herself a cappella.
"A lot of these records were just ignored once more popular music came along in the '40s. The Big Band era started and the war started and people kinda forgot about a lot of these Blues musicians.
"Those musicians had become janitors, going back to farming, and [the record companies] had to go down to see if they could still discover these people."
White will release the catalogs of both blues greats and obscure artists, in chronological order, for some time to come. The first three releases came out on January 29 with Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order 1 sets for Charley Patton, the Mississippi Sheiks and Willie McTell.
More from
VVN Music