Though his best-known music-themed graphics work is his classic cover to Big Brother and the Holding Company's concert album, Cheap Thrills, R. Crumb's musical sympathies have ever been toward older acoustic musicianship. His early underground comix are rife with refs to early blues platters (the cover to All New Zap Comix #1 contained a joking play on Blind Blake's "Diddie Wah Diddie" – and let's not forget the much-pirated "Keep on Truckin'" panels) while an alignment with record reissue companies like Arhoolie, Blue Goose & Yazoo resulted in a series of Crumb covers for old-time blues collections and anthologies.

Crumb's Yazoo elpee illos ultimately led to what was first proposed as a series of individually issued trading cards devoted to "Heroes of the Blues." As initially planned, Crumb's cards were going to be singly attached to new Yazoo releases, so that fans wanting to get a complete set would've been forced to shell out money for thirty-six long-players just to get the first full "Heroes" set. While I can appreciate the missionary motives that'd lead Crumb into wanting to expand his readership's listening experience, the obsessive collector in me is grateful that Yazoo ultimately decided to go a different packaging route with these cards, selling 'em as boxed sets instead.

The artist wound up doing three such collections for Yazoo, devoted primarily to obscure blues, jazz and country figures. Each hero (and occasional heroine – like the great blueswoman Memphis Minnie) was given a single card with a brief description of the artist's career written on the back by Stephen Calt, David Jasen or Richard Nevins. (Of the three sets, Nevins' country blurbs are the most info-packed.) Twenty years later, all three sets have been reprinted in a compact 6"-by-7-1/2" hardback, R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (Abrams). The book is a strong reflection of the artist's love for the largely unsung music of an earlier generation.

Utilizing old photos and snippets of newsreel footage as his primary source, Crumb tackles artists as diverse as the Memphis Jug Band to Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers to the more urbane sounds of Bennie Moten. A few more immediately recognizable names crop up in the three series – The Carter Family in the Country set, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in the Jazz collection – though as Terry Zwigoff notes in his introduction to the book, Crumb doubtless had the most fun doing pictures of figures only the most dieheart old music lover would immediately recognize.