For more than a century, blues guitarists have been pressing bottlenecks, bones, and metal to strings to create exhilarating melodies, propulsive chords and, in their best moments, feelings too deep for words. This collection gathers transcriptions of 27 groundbreaking bottleneck guitar gems from the 1920s through the 1960s.

From the beginning, bottleneck guitar and the blues have traveled side by side. In the earliest known description of a blues performer, W.C. Handy recounted seeing someone play this way in 1903. The event occurred late one night in the Tutwiler, Mississippi, train station. “A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept,” Handy wrote in his autobiographical Father of the Blues. “His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by the Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly: ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, ac-companying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.” This “weird” music Handy described would soon become known as the blues.

The artist featured in this collection: Bo Weavil Jackson, Sam Collins, Furry Lewis, Peg Leg Howell, Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton. Barbecue Bob, Blind Willie McTell, Kokomo Arnold, Son House, Tampa Red, Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Black Ace, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell.

Includes access to online audio.