Those who have read Adam Gussow's excellent biography Mr Satan's Apprentice probably know of Nat Riddles. Others probably don't. Adam thinks it's a shame, and from what he let me hear of Nat's playing, he's probably right.
In order to bring this wonderful unknown a little more in the limelight, Adam unearthed old tapes he recorded in 1989 on the streets of NYC, featuring Nat Riddles (vocals, harmonica) and Charlie Hilbert (guitar). Adam digitised them and has now released them for sale on Tradebit. The "album", entitled El Cafe Street Live!, features 24 tracks of deep street blues, the quality is rough but listenable, but it's not easy listening you'll be purchasing, it's a piece of blues history.
Nat Riddles died of Leukemia in 1991, and his recorded legacy is out of print and unlikely to ever be re-released. Here's some of what Adam says about Nat's playing:
The [uncanny] power [of Nat's playing] traces not just to his thoroughgoing mastery of the tradition, especially the styles of John Lee Williamson and Rice Miller (Sonny Boy 1 and 2), Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Kim Wilson, but to his distillation of those styles in a way that seems to reinvent the core values of the blues harmonica idiom. Revivalists, and there are many of them, recycle familiar moves. They play it safe. Nat never does. Instead he seizes the heart of the tradition and wrestles it into what he needs it to be in order to do the street-level work he has in mind. He reconfigures the tradition in line with his own personality: playful, lustful, gregarious, gallant, relaxed, and intense. He s got that New Yawk squawk. In your face, but never threatening, never gangsta.
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