
Song · Moby
“Natural Blues” by Moby
From the album Play (1999)
“Natural Blues” by Moby appears on 34 radio countdowns from 20 stations between 1999 and 2023. It was first released in 1999 on the album Play. Its best result is #10 on the Virgin Radio Top 10 Songs of 2000. In the combined RockLists rankings it is the #61 alternative song of 2000 and #1,925 alternative song of all time.
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Video from YouTube (mobyVEVO). Pressing play loads YouTube's player. Watch on YouTube
Moby dug "Natural Blues" out of the archives for Play, his fifth album, in 1999. The voice at its heart belongs to Vera Hall, lifted from her 1937 recording of "Trouble So Hard", which Moby found on a box set of American folk music gathered by the field collector Alan Lomax; that's why Hall and Lomax share the writing credit with him.
He produced and engineered it himself, looping Hall's plea over and over against a slow, rolling beat until an old field recording starts to sound like a hymn for the club's last hour. Moby called it ethereal and mournful, and he's right on both counts. I Monster took a turn at the mix. In Britain it climbed to number 11, and in Iceland it went all the way to the top.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
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