By Kurt Loder

It seems a little odd to pick up a compilation of vintage blues tracks and find Erykah Badu's name snuggled in among the credits. The album, due out next Tuesday, is called A Brief History of the Blues — a collection of classic performances by such masters as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith and Elmore James. Erykah crops up in a duet with guitarist and fellow Texan Doyle Bramhall II on an old Charley Patton song called "Oh Death," and it's a smoky, soulful take on the tune.

Why them? Well, for one thing, Badu and Bramhall have performed together in an ad-hoc band called Funk Sway (along with Prince vets Wendy and Lisa and Roots drummer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson). And Brief History co-producer Tonio K. says it made sense to render this song by "the Father of the Delta Blues" as a duet, because Patton had recorded it that way with his wife, Bertha Lee, at his last session in 1934. (The song had to be represented on this album by a cover version because of the dreadful audio quality of all of Patton's surviving work — the original masters were destroyed after his record company tanked, so his tracks have always had to be dubbed off of scratchy old 78 r.p.m. records.)

And was the jazzy Badu a hard sell to the record company for a bedrock-blues collection? "Universal, I'm sure, would have preferred Joss Stone or something," Tonio K. allows. "But we said ... 'No, no, no.' "