Album: Various Artists

This superb three-CD anthology – a sort of retrospective Now That's What I Call Music compilation from a particularly fecund era in popular music – makes for a sobering contrast with its modern-day equivalent. Compared with the formulaic, production-line manner of 21st-century pop, the diversity and subtle individuality of styles represented here is extraordinary: from Howlin' Wolf's bullfrog croak to Sam Cooke's ecstatic gospel tenor; from Charles Brown's enervated piano blues to John Lee Hooker's twitchy boogie. This was an era in which the larger swing bands of the wartime years were being supplanted by more economic small combos, with saxes and pianos still favoured over guitars. Producers, meanwhile, were finding new ways to compensate for the reduced size by such strategies as adding cavernous reverb to Jimmy Forrest's sax on the instrumental "Night Train", or employing speeded-up guitar and double-tracked unison vocals to give John Lee Hooker's "Walkin' The Boogie". Innuendo was popular on both sides of the gender divide – when Wynonie Harris sang "Keep On Churnin' (Til The Butter Come)", for instance, his mind was far from the dairy – and although violence was a less pervasive theme than it is today, it could be just as scary: as witness Rosco Gordon's delivery of the lines "When you take my wife and stay out late/ I'm gonna take my knife and op-er-ate". Recommended.