Box of the Blues, indeed. Any 4-CD set that begins with Mississippi Fred McDowell and ends with Walter “Wolfman” Washington has one hell of a lot of ground to cover, but Rounder’s retrospective of their impressive catalogue manages to do so without sounding like a musty old textbook or a reverent mass. These 60 selections represent the blues as life, not an art form, dead or living.

There are only a handful of cuts here that have never been released on CD, and the sequencing is completely haphazard, neither chronological nor themed, despite the arbitrary names given to all four discs (“61 Highway,” “One More Mile,” “Change In The Pocket,” and “A Good Day For The Blues”).

Box of the Blues therefore functions less as a history than a sampler, but the seemingly random order of the songs actually works in the set’s favor. To hear Cephas and Wiggins’ “One Kind Favor” sandwiched between Boogie Bill Webb’s “Dooleyville Blues” and Otis Spann’s “Blues For Martin Luther King” is to hear the thread running through an entire century of African-American struggle.

As might be expected from such respected archivists, the Rounder crew tend toward a more traditionalist tone—there are no “experiments” here, no crossover bids, no attempts to modernize the genre, and the newer selections here are mostly covers of older artists’ work. Yet the mixture of legendary and contemporary artists does plead a good case for the blues as a vital and enduring sound with real relevance to the 21st-century. (As a bonus, many New Orleanians may be surprised to find just how well the city is represented here; from the aforementioned Webb to Irma Thomas to Champion Jack Dupree to Theryl “Houseman” de’Clouet, the Crescent City has either birthed or housed many of the genre’s most important artists.) It may take the most direct path through the history of the blues, but as a very general, impeccably tasteful collection of its many styles, this box is bursting.