Album Review: Muddy Waters 100 by John Primer

Various ArtistsMuddy Waters 100(Raisin’ Music)Rating: 4 out of 5 stars You don’t have to be a blues aficionado to understand the immense impact Muddy Waters had on music history. He may not have been the first acoustic player to move to Chicago from the Southern plantations, plug in and electrify his music, but he was one of the most visible and influential. It also doesn’t take a blues historian to know his tunes have been covered hundreds of times over the decades.

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MUDDY WATERS electrified the blues — literally and figuratively. His iconic 1950s recordings set the template for Chicago’s amplified blues, shape-shifting the sound from its rural, acoustic roots to a modern, urban rallying cry. Though many of his best-known songs were written by Willie Dixon or others, Waters’ intepretations gave the blues such volume, girth, swing and depth they essentially morphed it into a new art form.

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Blues vet John Primer played in Muddy Waters' band, and he sounds like it — he has the late giant's slashing guitar tone and slurry vocal phrasing nailed. This handsome CD-book set of Muddy covers is his show. But the guests shine: Derek Trucks adds slither to a bad-ass triple-guitar take on "Still a Fool"; the late Johnny Winter (another veteran Muddy collaborator) does the same on "I'm Ready." Some tracks, like "Got My Mojo Working" (a vocal duet with Shemekia Copeland), smolder without catching fire.

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Henry Yates on new releases from Robert Chaney, Tensheds, Patrick Sweany, Roy Rogers and Muddy Waters 100 Robert Chaney: Cracked Picture Frames ADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads If this album was a film – and that’s how Robert Chaney intended it to feel – it’d hook you from the first frame. Over bleary-eyed bottleneck and a bust-microphone vocal, Black Eyed Susan finds the Florida-born songwriter in character as a wife-beater fielding a dawn visit from the cops (‘And then they turned to her, and she spoke not a word...’ ). _ _ .

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