Essential Collection

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2009-04-13 rating:
Muddy Waters Essential Collection
br /The disc quality has lived up to my expectations. br / br /However the case was badly broken during postage and my attempts to relay this to Amazon while I was in the UK where I had arranged to have delivery to my daughter's address there were frustrated by the absence of any direct means to communicate this.

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review by: date: 2009-04-04 rating:
Lots of great music. Flawed compilation
The British Spectrum label has issued a number of compilations featuring the big blues stars of the 50s and 60s, including Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, and while they completely lack the excellent liner notes of the various MCA/Chess compilations, the quality is otherwise quite high. br /But the lack of decent liner notes and recording information is a shame...there is nothing here but a short (and flawed) essay, which teams up with a not-quite-perfect track selection to make sure that this collection doesn't reach the level of the MCA discs. br / br /The sound is superb, however. The latest and best quality mastering has been utilized, and most of Muddy Waters' best songs are indeed here, as well as a few odd but (sometimes) quite interesting choices. br /Unfortunately the compilers have also chosen the midguided psychedelic ersion of "Hoochie Coochie Man" recorded for the hideous "Electric Mud" album, and the "Mud" version of "Mannish Boy" is here as well. Fortunately almost all the rest of Muddy Waters' classic singles are present in their original versions: "I'm Ready", "Got My Mojo Working", the swinging "Baby Please Don't Go", the wonderful harp-driven "Forty Days And Forty Nights", the tough swagger of "I Want To Be Loved" and "I Just Wanna Make Love To You", and the superbly melodic "I Love The Life I Live, I Live The Life I Love". br / br /But it is a shame that none of Waters' late-40s singles are here. The closest we get it 1950's "Rollin' Stone", and songs like "I Can't Be Satisfied", "Rollin' And Tumblin'" and "Gypsy Woman" really belongs on a disc which has the audacity to call itself "Essential". br /MCA's "Chess Box" remains the definitive overview of Muddy's Chess career, and the superb double-disc "The Anthology 1947-1972" is right behind it. And maybe someday the MCA label will combine the best from "His Best 1947-1955" and "His Best 1956-1964" on one disc to create the ultimate single-disc Muddy compilation. Because this one doesn't quite cut it, and while the music is generally very good, there are just too many misses.

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review by: Alice Collector date: 2008-05-28 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. br /Which is besides the point-the pop charts are only a mirror to public taste. br /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. br /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. br /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 br /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. br /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. br /After all you can't get much more blatant than i just wanna make love to you!! br /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. br /Muddy Waters and his contemporaries were simply waiting for the climate to change

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review by: anon date: 2005-05-19 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.


review by: date: 2004-08-27 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.

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