the sound." The Paramount Records discs presented considerable problems for the audio engineers, as Henderson explained "some of the Charley Patton recordings were very noisy just because they're Paramount Records and they're the hardest to restore," Henderson says. "There'd be so much noise, and that's very difficult to remove manually." Some of the selections were repressed from the original metal parts, which the production located whilst researching the films. Peter Henderson explained "in some cases we were lucky enough to get some metal parts – that's the originals where they were cut to wax and the metal was put into the grooves and the discs were printed from those back in the '20s. Some of those still exist – Sony had some of them in their vaults." Reception The album was acclaimed for its song selection and the quality of the restoration work. Robert Christgau in Noisey reviewing the 17-track download, awarded the album an A grade and made it his number 2 Best Album of 2017, writing "anyone interested owns somewhat fainter and scratchier versions of tracks on this definitive country blues compilation. But conceptually and song for song, these 17 clear, rich, cannily sequenced Duke Erikson remasters—Delta guys mostly, with hokum bands and two Texans mixed in for extra flavor—leaves them in the dust. Bernard MacMahon defies convention by beginning with an anachronistic culmination—Robert Johnson's mythic "Cross Road Blues" was cut in 1937 (sic), well after country blues's 78-rpm flowering. He blends in the warhorses-in-waiting "'Tain't Nobody's Business," "Walk Right In," and "Sitting on Top of the World." He welcomes Mattie Delaney's polished, still obscure "Tallahatchie River Blues" and Geeshie Wiley's eerie, now canonical "Last Kind Word Blues" into an assertively male canon. And he justifies the ongoing mystification of Blind Willie Johnson's hummed, moaned, postverbal "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by closing with it, as if to prove that, in the end, the message of this music is beyond words." He summarized the album as a "titantic American Epic blues compilation". Randy Lewis in the Los Angeles Times praised the reverse engineering noting "one unforeseen fringe benefit of the reconstruction of the original recording machine: playing records that were made with it decades ago yields unprecedented audio fidelity." Ed Whitelock in PopMatters wrote that "it must be noted that the re-mastering of the American Epic tracks show the benefit both of 25 years of