Muddy Waters
brought a
Son House
-like Delta country-blues style north with him from Mississippi to Chicago in 1943, intent on making a living from music. Switching from acoustic to electric guitar in order to be better heard in the Chicago clubs and bars,
Waters
gradually assembled one of the greatest ongoing bands in the history of blues, and in the process,
and his band assembled the very template for classic Chicago blues.
first cut a track for the
Chess Brothers
in 1947, who released it on their
Aristocrat Records
imprint, and for the next two decades or so,
turned out the basic iconic catalog of electric Chicago blues for various
Chess
imprints, and those singles, both A- and B-sides, are collected here in this four-disc, 98-track set.
was an astute bandleader, and musicians like
Little Walter,
Junior Wells
,
James Cotton
Willie Dixon
, and
Otis Spann
all contributed heavily to these sides, which sit at the very heart of Chicago blues, and signal the very point where the blues became modern and urban. ~ Steve Leggett