Muddy Waters: Best Of (180g, clear vinyl) [WAX TIME]

Why you'll love it

This Wax Time edition puts the album on limited 180g crystal clear vinyl and adds four more early sides, for 16 tracks in all. The original LP was Muddy's first album, and the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame inducted it as a Classic of Blues Recording in 1983.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Clear vinyl
• Limited edition
• Four bonus tracks

About the album

Long before the album was the main event, Chess Records sold its blues one 78 at a time. In April 1958 the label gathered a dozen of Muddy Waters' singles from 1948 to 1954, most of them top 10 R&B hits, onto one long-player, just the third LP Chess had ever put out.

It's the sound of Chicago blues being invented in real time. Little Walter's amplified harmonica wails across most of it, Willie Dixon's bass drives "I Just Want to Make Love to You," "I'm Ready" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," and Jimmy Rogers, Otis Spann and Fred Below fill out the band. Big Crawford plays bass on the early sides like "Louisiana Blues" and "I Can't Be Satisfied," "Rollin' Stone" rolls on a single brooding guitar, and "Long Distance Call" and "Honey Bee" show off Muddy's slide. Studs Terkel wrote the liner notes.

Chess re-sequenced it and gave it a new title, Sail On, in 1969. Leonard Chess, who owned the label, played bass drum on two tracks himself, which is the kind of hands-on management most of us can merely dream of.

Also at Kops: more Muddy Waters on vinyl · browse Blues

Tracklist

Listen

On Wax Time (cat# 526018), a reissue of the 1958 compilation.