Founded three decades ago by folklore grad student Tim Duffy, the Music Maker Relief Foundation preserves music and musicians. The music is rural Southern blues, gospel and mountain folk, and the musicians are the largely elderly, mostly financially stressed individuals who still perform in these styles, today at the margins of American life and awareness. Sales of albums, now almost 170 in number (a figure that frankly astonishes me; even more so, "many more in its vaults"), go to financial support of artists, career guidance, concerts and education programs. For details see Music Maker's Wiki entry.

Hanging Tree Guitars is a Music Maker sampler of the black performers it's recorded, a dozen cuts of downhome, mostly acoustic blues and hardcore gospel. Though I am reasonably well informed in blues matters, I had encountered only one of the artists here represented, namely Guitar Gabriel, whose Music Maker disc Deep in the South I purchased soon after its release in 1992. It's still in print, and recommended.

Chances are, if you've heard country blues, you were introduced to it on pioneering reissue labels such as Yazoo and Biograph, deeply welcome but afflicted with the kind of sound quality you get from recovered 78s retrieved from somebody who bought them decades before and had made no particular effort to keep the sound clean. (Since then, with advances in recording technology, those reissues sound a whole lot easier on the ear.) Hanging Tree consists of fairly recent stuff, cut for the most part in field recordings between the 1970s and this year, and boasts a lovely, rich sound.

The title is derived from a startling project by Freeman Vines, luthier and creator of guitars he fashioned out of trees associated with lynchings. Vines himself is not on the album, though he is related to the Vines Sisters whose 1977 single "Get Ready" appears here for the first time in digital form. Some cuts, such as "Slavery Time Blues" (Rufus McKenzie), "Hard Luck & Trouble" (Bishop Dready Manning) and "Black Man's Dream" (Adolphus Bell), are angry protest songs of a kind first-generation, Jim Crow-era Southern blues singers did not dare sing publicly out of a well-founded concern for their lives.

Everything is worth hearing, and performed with a heart-grabbing intensity, whatever the theme the singer/instrumentalist is addressing. That definitely includes Dr. G.B. Burt's reading of Johnny Ace's pop song "Clock on the Wall." To me, however, slide-guitarist John Lee Zeigler wins the gold with 6:18 minutes' worth of the venerable working-class-hero ballad "John Henry," in his delicate, soulful treatment something that should be placed on a rocket into deep space to show whatever aliens pick it up what human beings are capable of. You'll be hearing this one in your dreams.