Last Session

Recorded in Atlanta in September 1956 in the back room of a record shop, this was an impromptu session set up when a folklorist and record dealer learned that the ageing, blind Piedmont songster was still in town and persuaded him to sit for a portable tape machine. McTell, then in poor health and only a year from his death, ran through a mixture of blues, spirituals, hokum numbers and old pop and hillbilly songs he had played on the streets and in juke joints for three decades, occasionally joined by his old partner Curley Weaver on a second guitar. He had already recorded prolifically in the 1920s-40s for a string of labels under different names, and by the 1950s was a relatively forgotten figure whose intricate fingerpicked 12-string style and warm, conversational vocal delivery represented one of the high points of Piedmont blues musicianship. The loose, unhurried nature of the session - McTell talking between songs, calling for a drink, singing whatever came to mind - gives the record an unusually intimate, documentary quality rather than a polished studio performance. It stands as the last substantial recorded testament of an artist widely regarded as one of the finest guitarists and most versatile songsters to come out of the Georgia blues tradition, and it has been treated by blues scholars and later generations of musicians as an essential late chapter in his catalogue and in the history of pre-war-rooted acoustic blues.