RECORDS / New releases: Deep Blues (Anxious 4509-91981-2, CD & tape)

Ten years ago, the Arkansas-born critic Robert Palmer wrote an important study of the roots of southern blues. Last year, he and Dave Stewart, the Eurythmic, made a documentary transferring the idea to the TV screen. Now comes a recording which illustrates the persistence of the blues. 'This is not folk music,' Palmer writes, combatively. Instead, recorded in front rooms and juke joints throughout Mississippi, featuring the voices, guitars and bands of unknowns, it is a music that lives, breathes, shouts and brawls with an unforced intensity. One of the essential releases of recent years.