Make Trouble Waters

Muddy Waters performing live at the University of Oregon in 1971. A postwar Chicago blues scene without the magnificent contributions of Muddy Waters is absolutely unimaginable. From the late '40s on, he eloquently defined the city's aggressive, swaggering, Delta-rooted sound with his declamatory vocals and piercing slide guitar attack. When he passed away in 1983, the Windy City would never quite recover. Like many of his contemporaries on the Chicago circuit, Waters was a product of the fertile Mississippi Delta. Born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, he grew up in nearby Clarksdale on Stovall's Plantation.

The Chess Box does not contain all the great music Muddy Waters made. His talent and legacy are too large to be captured in a mere three discs, even one that spans from 1947 to 1972. This means, of course, that his legendary plantation recordings with Alan Lomax are not here, nor is his dynamic late-'70s comeback, Hard Again. But, truth be told, it doesn't feel like they're missing, since Waters' legend was built on the music that he made for Chess, and much of the greatest of that is here. Few box sets have chronicled an artist's best work as effectively as this; even the handful of rare, previously unreleased recordings sit perfectly next to the essential singles (this is particularly true of alternate takes of Fathers and Sons material). Sure, there are great Chess sides that aren't here, but those are great sides that the serious listener and aficionado need to seek out. For everybody else, this is a monumental chronicle of Waters at his best, illustrating his influence while providing rich, endlessly fascinating music.

Muddy Waters - The Anthology (2001)
foobar 2000 rip | FLAC, No CUE, No LOG | Cover | 2CDs/667MB
Blues | Label: MCA/Chess | Release: August 2001 | RAR | RS.com

Waters started out playing acoustic guitar in Mississippi, but when he moved to Chicago in 1943, he needed an electric instrument to be heard over the tumult of South Side clubs. The sound he developed was the foundation of Chicago blues, and rock & roll. The thick, bleeding tones of his slide work anticipated rock-guitar distortion by nearly two decades. Jimi Hendrix adapted Waters' "Rollin' Stone" for "Voodoo Chile," Bob Dylan found inspiration in it for "Like a Rolling Stone," and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took their band's name from it. The fifty essential cuts on these two CDs run from guitar-and-standup-bass duets to full-band romps — and they still just manage to scratch the surface of Waters' legacy.

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

75 blues classics with up to 3 hours of music from Muddy Waters, the Father Of Modern Chicago Blues.