The Essential Blues of Muddy Waters
Arne Dicke | Denver | 12/15/1999
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Back in the 50's, a few of us Chicago suburban kids surreptitiously tuned the radio to WGES, high on the dial, to hear disk jockey Sam Evans. The best part was when he took us "Down, way down to the basement" to hear the blues by McKinley Morganfield--Muddy Waters--and his sidemen. "Folk Blues," and more especially "More Folk Blues," came out in the sixties, but contain fifties recordings, made before Mike Bloomfield and other "discovered" Muddy and the recordings slicked up. They are almost the only way to relive the experience of raw early electric blues as played at Pepper's Lounge and around the South Side. No one ever phrased a song like Muddy: in "I wisht I knew what cha-a-nge-d my baby's mind," the four-syllable rendering and the amazing note speaks of loss in a never-reproduced voice. The tunes are the upbeat sound with the submerged hurt that defines real blues: "Hello, little girl, you sure do appeal to me. You know you remind me of my all-time used-to-be." If blues means more to you than crashing metal and incoherent screaming, you need this CD."
What you want, what you really need, the real deal
Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 01/16/2004
(5 out of 5 stars)
"These are classic sides. They aren't some stupid adaptation to the folk craze of the 1960s by Muddy--that would come 5-10 years later with too many badly produced quickie albums done for the the blues rock album. These are nice classic Mississippi/Chicago blues albums. More acoustic guitar than in his regular performances, but still more personally tinged, closer to his original records in the late 1940s. This is a master at work and these are songs he did that are classics in the blues repertoire because of these recordings. If you are a serious lover of the blues, you probably have these sides already. If not you want to get them. If you just like good music and love your ears, and can witness the dramatic power, the humor, the strength and the sexiness that Waters conveys with his voice and music, you also need this. As I said in my review of Muddy's real folk blues, every note Muddy played and sang was real folk blues from Stovall Planatation to the Day he died!"
Track Listings (24) - Disc #1