Of the 20 albums connected to the series, seven are soundtracks to the series episodes, twelve are single-artist collections, and the final is an exceptional 21-song series sampler simply called The Best of the Blues.

The collection begins appropriately with "Cross Road Blues" by the enigmatic Robert Johnson, king of the Mississippi Delta bluesmen. Johnson was born in 1911, and his first wife died in childbirth when he was 19 and she was 16 - for the next year he wandered in misery throughout the Delta.

Johnson returned home on a summer Saturday night with an odd look in his eye, dragged his guitar into the local roadhouse, and while the performers and crowd took a break outside, he began to play. His anguished yet supple singing and startling guitar accompaniment drew a gasp from the crowd. Word quickly spread that the young man had "sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that," and the news of Johnson's prowess spread widely as he traveled to St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and New York.

Robert Johnson recorded his entire 29-song body of work in two days in a San Antonio hotel room in November, 1936 and a Dallas warehouse in June of 1937, and we can be thankful he did: the most exceptional bluesman of all time was poisoned to death by a jealous husband at a roadhouse in 1938. Johnson's greatness lies in his songwriting ("Cross Road Blues," "Come On In My Kitchen," "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Love In Vain"), his eerie high, straining voice, and his complex walking bass and slide guitar style that served as exhilarating counterpoint to his fables of hellhounds, conferences with the devil, and beguiling evil women.

Johnson is one of the twelve artists with a CD collection of his own connected to the series, as is Bessie Smith, whose "Muddy Water" is the next song on The Best of the Blues. While Johnson was the classic rural solo bluesman, Smith, the "Empress of the Blues," performed a more sophisticated, urban style accompanied by some of the finest jazz instrumentalists of the '20s and '30s, among them Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, and Fletcher Henderson.

Legendary talent scout and producer John Hammond called Smith "the greatest vocalist to come out of the blues tradition," and her performance here and on her own collection ("Down Hearted Blues," "'Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out") does nothing to contradict that opinion.

Skip James' story is told in the impressionistic Wim Wenders-directed series episode The Soul of a Man. James was a superior rural Delta bluesman with a complex, intensely musical finger-picking guitar style and high lonesome voice, who won a local talent contest and was summoned to Wisconsin to record for Paramount in 1931. James' session, including "Devil Got My Woman," was a triumph but the company soon went under after only a handful of his records had been released. James returned in dismay to the Delta, and unaware that his records were already treasured collectors items, gave up the blues and vanished.