MCA/Chess has recently put out four classic "two-for" blues collections originally released in the '60s under the titles The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues, by Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin' Wolf: the very heart of the Chess blues roster.
Muddy Waters is the greatest of the Chicago bluesmen, and arguably second in importance in blues history only to Robert Johnson, but the Chess label was also crucial to Waters' success. The Chess brothers ruled Chicago blues in the pivotal '50s and '60s and helped facilitate the transition from the rural acoustic blues of the Mississippi Delta to the urban electric blues Waters pioneered and perfected.
Lazer and Philip Chez, aged 11 and 6, were herded through Ellis Island on Columbus Day 1928 from their village near Pinsk, Poland, and transformed into Leonard and Phil Chess. They joined their father, who had been running a junkyard in a Jewish neighborhood near the South Side of Chicago.
Leonard's childhood polio left him with a limp, ineligible for military service. During the war he pursued various business interests, including liquor stores and dive bars. Eventually, he moved up to the Macomba Lounge, an upscale jazz and blues club at the heart of the South Side. The club featured major national acts like Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong. The predominantly black crowds were regular and enthusiastic, and as label talent scouts sniffed around the back door, Leonard realized he could sell records as well as drinks to his customers.
The Chess brothers bought into a local label called Aristocrat in 1947. Early releases were a hodgepodge of jazz, pop and blues. Aristocrat also generated controversy early on with the release of the single, "Union Man Blues/Bilbo Is Dead," by Macomba house singer Andrew Tibbs. "Union Man" angered the Teamsters in the North, and "Bilbo Is Dead," an ironic lament about the passing of Mississippi segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo, riled those who cared about such things in the South.
For his first Aristocrat session, "Johnson Machine Gun," veteran Chicago blues pianist Sunnyland Slim brought in a youthful guitarist, Muddy Waters, fresh from the Mississippi Delta. Waters recorded "I Can't Be Satisfied" (not in this collection, but "Screamin' and Cryin'," "Canary Bird," "Gypsy Woman," "Little Geneva," "Sittin' Here and Drinkin'," "Down South Blues," "Train Fare Home Blues" and "Kind Hearted Woman" from the same era are) in April 1948 and the first issue sold out in 12 hours. Reeking of the country funk of the Delta, Waters' single is a violent shout into the void that laid the foundation of the Chess sound: heavy on vicious electric slide guitar, thumping rhythm and unadulterated blues wailing.
Leonard reportedly couldn't understand what Waters was singing in the studio, but he understood the sales and somehow grasped that the records sold because, not in spite, of the track's rawness.
This insight was of such importance that American Heritage magazine (December 1994) selected the Chess brothers as among the 10 most important agents of change in America since 1950 with the following comment:
- "The Chess brothers made records that helped transport African-American culture, especially its language and music, to its central place in American culture...The Chess brothers' story is one in which greed and inspiration swirled together in a characteristically American pot where the ingredients did not so much melt as alloy in a metallurgical sense: steel guitar, electricity, and vinyl transmuted into a wholly new cultural substance."
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