A great fan of the music of Nassau's Blind Blake since my childhood, I am nearing the completion of a project which I had hoped to tackle for many decades. After years of scouring sites like EBay for copies of the vinyl records I wore out in my younger days, I managed to acquire some copies of four albums (two with some duplicate tracks). The audio quality of these might be described as "fair". There are some clicks and scratches, damaged grooves and some distortion, all relatively minor.
               For some time now, an extraordinarily gifted recording engineer friend has been filtering, processing and re-mastering the material with some cutting-edge computer technology. He is not quick and he is a congenital procrastinator, but he is a very dear old friend and, if he survives the ordeal, he will finish the job. The big news is that I have heard samples of the tracks he has worked on and the sound quality, purity, tonality, etc... is simply fantastic.
               Over the years, I have heard many a commercial CD offering digitally remastered versions of recordings that were far more recent and "mainstream" than these early fifties efforts by an obscure Miami record company. Few of them have achieved the level of enhancement that I've been hearing with this project. What a thrill to at last hear this stuff sounding better than I can ever remember.
               I did not undertake this project with an eye to making money from it. I do not know anything at all about the current state of the copyright, publishing rights, or any such legalities pertaining to this material. I haven't the time, or the means to start producing a great quantity of copies. I would like to know if anyone out there might have reliable information about these matters. If I could be sure that I would not be engaging in legally risky behavior, I would be pleased to make available a few copies to some other Blind Blake enthusiasts for no more than what it would cost to produce and ship the completed CD edition. I will return to this site periodically to determine if anyone is interested.