The Essential 50 Blues Albums for your Vinyl Record Collection…for now:

5 min readFeb 18, 2019

The resurgence of vinyl records is back in the news, and being myself a fan, that’s great. I suppose this has something to do with the younger music listener coming off the back of digital CD & Mp3 and who has now the purchasing power & the motivational push to invest in appropriate Hi-Fi equipment and go out searching to buy the actual vinyl records. This last aspect could well not be a financial investment effort at all if one inherits a relevant vinyl collection off parents or from that “wacky music freak Uncle”, if so, it's like winning the lottery. Either way, it is always a coming of age temptation to finally be able to test empirically that long heard and repeated statement especially to the younger folk bombarded by “elders” with… “vinyl always will sound better than the digital product”. The scientific explanation of those “in the know”, that digital flattens out the different audio peaks that analogue allows compels the “digital age” music aficionado to put to the test all this and hear it for oneself.

Once the science is actually proven, the whole practice, ritual & paraphernalia of listening to vinyl records overtakes you firmly to finally drive home the message towards conversion & be inducted into the “Cool Vinyl Tribe”. If millennial, once listened to vinyl…always hooked…, & if an older ex-user, once relived …again hooked.

Now back again hooked onto the vinyl listening vice, one of the best musical styles for playing vinyl records, in my opinion, and really picking up on the sound difference is “Blues”. Yes, Jazz & Rock N Roll work & will also do the trick, but for me Blues has that past element and atmosphere that adds to the whole listening experience, mentally sending you back in time. Under this context, I have reflected recently what are the greatest Blues records for a really worthwhile vinyl collection? That is to say, which Blues records are the ones you want to build on for the coolest & most complete BLUES vinyl record collection possible? Or, which are the 50 essential Blues albums? Difficult question to answer indeed, as you have to enter within the subjective & personal judgement realm.

However, thinking for myself and allowing a wide enough choice margin out of the many valid possibilities in existence, the titles don’t have to be necessarily the famed “BEST ALL TIME” but just 50 Blues Records that can serve as the building blocks to your collection (especially for beginners) which will be added onto latter by other discoveries and newer records.

The following list is my choice of Blues records that may interest you to include & have become part of a really serious and cool record collection — always under my criteria & opinion. I have restricted the election in number to only 50 for the sake of imposing strict discipline forcing me to really think about my choices. Lastly, there is no particular order of ranking, let’s not make the exercise more “painful” than it is.

Listening to the below list of artists and titles in the vinyl format is sort of “heavenly” for a Blues fans in our modern technological moving forward times, it is certainly in my case, and I hope that it is useful & can serve for any other music lover who is thinking about getting into vinyl, beginning to construct or expand their vinyl collection, be that the Blues as a starter.

The Essential 50 Blues Albums for a Record Collection…for now: