Waters, Muddy: Folk Singer [DOL]

Why you'll love it

This 180g gatefold edition adds five bonus tracks from the 1964 sessions that followed. Folk Singer is the one album Muddy made entirely unplugged, and Rolling Stone ranked it No. 280 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list in 2003.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Five bonus tracks

About the album

Chess Records had a simple idea in 1963: folk music was selling, so why not put the king of Chicago electric blues on an acoustic guitar and see what happened. What happened was one of the most intimate records in the blues canon, cut at Ter Mar Recording Studios in Chicago that September. Willie Dixon produced, and Chess picked the title to catch the folk crowd's eye.

Muddy plays acoustic guitar with a young Buddy Guy alongside him, Willie Dixon on string bass and Clifton James on drums. Most of the songs move at a slow, deliberate crawl, so every hum and sigh in Muddy's voice lands. "My Home Is in the Delta" and "Long Distance" sound like they're coming from the next chair, "Good Morning School Girl" picks up the pace, and "Feel Like Going Home" closes the original nine songs.

The bonus tracks here, including "The Same Thing" and "My John the Conquerer," come from the sessions that followed in 1964. Reviewers have been singling out its sound for sixty years, which is a lot of praise to heap on two acoustic guitars and a double bass.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On DOL (cat# DOL978HG), a reissue of the 1964 album.