The music sales platform Bandcamp has announced that on the first Fridays in February, March, April, and May, it will not take its usual 15 percent cut on album sales. That means if you buy any albums from the Music Maker catalog on February 5, March 5, April 2, or May 7, Music Maker will get 100 percent of what you pay — aiding our ability to help Southern musicians living in poverty. Here are our suggested gems for this coming Friday, as recommended by Music Maker team member Nick Loss-Eaton. To buy any of these albums from Bandcamp, just click the link in the heading or on the album cover.

Various Artists: Hanging Tree Guitars

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The Hanging Tree Guitars album accompanies the book of the same name by Freeman Vines with Zoe Van Buren and includes blues and gospel music by Guitar Gabriel, Bishop Dready Manning and others from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, plus a vintage 1970s side by the Glorifying Vines Sisters. It’s such a powerful compilation that the dean of music critics, Robert Christgau, called it the best album of 2020. All its songs directly confront the topic of race in America, perhaps none more pointedly than Adolphus Bell’s “Black Man’s Dream,” which finds him singing, “I fought on your battlefields, died and killed for America, and still you don’t think I’m real. I worked in your fields from sunup till sundown — planted cotton, picked cotton, chopped cotton — and still you don’t think I’m real. Change, America, change.”

James Davis: Georgia Drumbeat

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My favorite album of 2007! When I first heard it, I was astonished it wasn’t from Mississippi, because it bears quite a sonic resemblance to the North Mississippi sound, especially that of Othar Turner and Sharde Thomas, with deep syncopation and sonic qualities that harken back to Africa. Davis, a Perry, Georgia, native, was first recorded by George Mitchell in the late 1970s. Historically, the term Black Belt was used to describe a section of land from east to west that was especially rich in farmland and to which more slaves were brought, resulting in a larger African-American population even today. This album, besides being a blast to listen to, shows us that the influence of a deeper strain of African music spread more broadly through the Black Belt and beyond, although much of it is now lost to recorded history. This is not available on streaming services.

Cootie Stark: Sugar Man

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A blind street singer born to sharecropper parents, Stark learned at the feet of the legendary Pink Anderson as well as Baby Tate and Uncle Chump in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1930s. After joining Music Maker, he toured with Taj Mahal and recorded with Kenny Wayne Shepherd as well as performing in France, Germany, and Belgium and at NYC’s famed Lincoln Center. He is a South Carolina Folk Heritage Award winner. This is the acoustic debut album by the then-70-year-old master of eastern Carolina Piedmont blues.