Black Cat Bone: The Anthology

Essentially this marginal recording — essentially a glorified bootleg recording — comes from two different volumes called Black Cat Bone: Live at the Texas Pop Festival from 1969. This is early Johnny Winter, pre-Johnny Winter &, performing a slew of blues classics and originals that hail from the Progressive Blues Experiment and his self-titled debut recording for Columbia. Certainly, this is Winter on fire as a guitarist; that's indisputable. The problem lies with the dodgy sound quality of the recording, and the readily available nature of the material, which makes this highly questionable in terms of value even for collectors — only 17 of the 23 that made up the original performance. Buyers beware.