Music : Essential Collection

Rating: - Essential-hardly
Depend who this is supposed to be essential do-the newcomer to the Urban blues which influenced the British blues bands or essential as the biggest songs are here.Big via other people not especially Muddy who I don't think troubled the pop charts.
Which is besides the point-the pop charts are only a mirror to public taste.
In the U K Muddy waters was represnted in the 50s by a solitary EP which retailed at the same price as Cliff Richard or Elvis so it died a death and was only there because Decca were licensing product from Chess having only just obttained the catalog.
Muddy Waters was also a very unlikely artist to aim his music at the charts for the simple reason that while he may have introduced Chuck Berry to Chess he was not aiming his music at teenagers like Berry but doing his own thing like Bo Diddley.Berry it was said had only about 3 tunes and 3 rghtms -Muddy Waters had just one-the 12 bar blues.
Fats Domino he wasn't and never would be.In the mid 50s Joe Turner was about where he might have been but Chess was more interested in promoting Chuck Berry
By the time the Stones discovered Waters and named their band after a song he cut there was still a long way to go before America found out about its own musical past.For Waters that had begun in the mid 40s when his music was rural rather than urban.
To the America of the 50s Muddy Waters,Howlin' Wolf and Bo Diddley were seen as threats because the songs were about sex and not about high school life.
After all you can't get much more blatant than i just wanna make love to you!!
That's if they were ever heard of in the times of Pat Boone and Elvis These blues guys were artists who would begin to be appreciated after the Stones era had begun.
Muddy Waters and his contemporaries were simply waiting for the climate to change

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Rating: - almost perfect
This is a good record of a very great artist and it contains some of the most seminal and hard-hitting blues in the catalogue. However, there are a few essential recordings not represented here and these versions of Mannish Boy and Hootchie Cootchie Man are not the originals and a long way from being the best. Although HCM is a more than acceptable, this version of MB is frankly pants. All the same at this price, it's a good value cd as are the sister volumes by Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. For serious Muddy fans however, the two cd 'Collection, though more expensive, is a better deal in the long run.

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Rating: - perfect
Absolutely perfect: raw vocals, blues in its purest form. The Grandfather of just about every type of music to follow. Can't pick one favourite, but if I had to, Hoochie Coochie Man, Mojo working, I Just Want to Make Love to You...buy it. You'll play it to death.