Great blues artists need not be virtuoso musicians of the sort proudly paraded around by genres such as jazz and classical music. When expression and emotion are the main requirements — and real expression and emotion, not just professional stage dramatics — then playing one million notes per minute or having the most perfect sound on earth becomes much less important. But this is all a way of building up to the opinion that Robert Pete Williams is indeed a virtuoso, making him one of the most exciting country blues musicians to ever record as well as one of the most musically interesting. Again, it isn't a matter of playing a lot of notes, but how he plays them. Within a single passage he will sometimes employ three or four brilliantly subtle techniques — for example, a run played with the strings slightly muted followed by a clever punching of the rhythm with a single staccato chord. He creates passages of notes in which each one is played with a slightly different feel, an intricate and difficult accomplishment that few blues artists even think about, let alone do. He also rarely repeats himself, does fascinating things with the harmonic structure, and in each song evolves a relationship between guitar and voice that is stunning. On his "I'm Going Down Slow," for example, his blues lines utilize syncopation and offbeat accents that are more commonly associated with the blues inventions of jazz giants such as Charlie Parker, not country blues artists who are thought of as more primitive in their concept. Is that notion ever wrong! "Ugly," also known as "Grown So Ugly," is one of the most powerful songs ever from the country blues tradition. It is also easily this artist's most famous number due to a cool, but eventually inferior, cover version by Captain Beefheart, one of the few times the Captain took on something he couldn't quite handle. The only real quibble with this set, and it is very small, is the missed opportunity for a good album cover. Someone at this label had strange notions of design when Takoma's handful of blues releases came out. The small photo of the artist on the back cover with his scribbled signature would have been a much better choice if enlarged to fill the front cover than the awful artwork that is featured. Whatever. Put a paper bag over it, but just listen to it.

(by Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide)