Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey, the companion CD package to the PBS film series, is nominated for Best Historical Album.

The list winds on like the mighty Mississippi to include many of the greatest popular musicians and songwriters of the 20th century: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, B.B King, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, the Allman Brothers Band, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Bessie Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin, Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, Lead Belly, to name but a few. All of them were created by, and in turn helped create America's first great original art form - the blues.

Originally springing from those largely excluded from the fruits and mercies of their own land, the blues at its best is a profound artistic expression of sorrow, frustration, and - against all odds - joy. And the influence of the blues is almost ubiquitous: Muddy Waters wrote a song called "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll," but Muddy could have added jazz, R&B, soul, folk, even hip-hop to the remarkable list of the blues' musical offspring.

The Year of the Blues

In recognition of the blues' contributions to American culture and musical heritage, Congress declared 2003 the Year of the Blues , and we are now in the middle of a blues-related frenzy of media activity, the centerpiece of which is the engrossing seven-part television series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (also available in DVD and VHS formats), which aired on PBS in October. Not to be outdone by previous PBS series on jazz, baseball or the Civil War, the prodigious product spinoff from The Blues includes 20 albums, a five-CD boxed set, a book, and an upcoming feature-length concert film, all neatly and carefully branded.

Why all this now? In the summer of 1903, proper, classically trained African-American composer W.C. Handy stepped a bit stiffly off a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi, took a seat in the station and soon nodded off in the heat. Handy was jolted from his repose by the "weirdest music I had ever heard," created by a lean young black man who sang in a strange moaning style and accompanied himself on guitar by sliding a knife up and down the neck. "The music stayed in my mind," Handy wrote in his autobiography, and he went on to become the first formal composer of the blues, beginning its spread from the Mississippi Delta to the world.

The Music

The bells, whistles, wrapping and frills are swell and all, but the final assessment of this extended project comes down to the music - does it warrant this kind of output? The answer is a resounding yes: the CD collections released in conjunction with the series get the major players and themes right, spotlight some appealing lesser lights, and delight with some real surprises.