Hi, Muddy Waters!

The past two days I've been trying to get my mojo working, which is not easy when you're analyzing reinsurance requirements. Listening to Muddy Waters helps. I've been looping through the two volume His Best releases from Chess Records, the essential Chicago blues label, which cover the prime years of 1947 to 1964. BTW, Chess was not responsible for producing the lamentable Tubby Chess and His Candy-Striped Twisters – a short-lived group that bit off the two stars whose names combine pulchritude and table games (the original of the type, Fats Domino, and name-copycat Chubby Checkers) as well as Joey Dee of "Peppermint Twist" fame. Somewhere out there I even found a reference to one "Pudgy Parcheesi", but I don't think he ever cut a 45.

Anyways, this time around besides being awed as usual by the combination of masculine gravitas, bone-deep sexuality, and blues authority that Muddy radiates, I've been focusing on some of the great band work by Otis Spann, Little Walter, Willie Dixon (the renaissance man of Chicago blues), and later work by Pinetop Perkins and James Cotton. Great stuff, all.

Songs catching my ear this time around (besides "of course" tracks like "Rock Me", "Mannish Boy", "I Love the Life I Live…" "Rollin' and Tumblin''' and "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had") include "Long Distance Call" and "Walkin' Thru The Park":

I'm goin' out walkin',
down the old avenue
I'm goin' out walkin'
down the old avenue
I'm gonna walk for so long,
till she don't know what to do