It wasn't until Waters moved up to Chicago in the mid 1940's that his career took off. He is now considered the father of the Chicago Blues sound that was the basis for most of the hard Blues/Rock that's come out in the years since. Bands as diverse as Led Zeppelin and AC/DC have all pointed to Waters as a primary influence, and the grand daddy of British Blues bands, The Rolling Stones, took their name from his song "Rollin' Stone."
Like most of the greats from those early Blues eras, he was usurped by those who came after until he was "rediscovered" in the first roots rock revival of the 1970's. Between then and his death in 1983, he produced four albums re-working his best music with people like Johnny Winters, Levon Helm, and Garth Hudson. Of these, the three Johnny Winter-produced albums are considered seminal Muddy Waters.
The two-disc set. They Call Me Muddy Waters, features recordings from both highpoints of Muddy's career, 1940's –50's Chicago and the late seventies "re-discovery" era. Disc one features all his great hits as they were originally recorded for Chess Records with a line up including Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon (who also produced many of these early recordings), James Cotton, Junior Wells, and Little Walter.
On disc two, we fast-forward twenty years to a live concert in Poland where he and his band from the Johnny Winter recordings run through some of the same material, but primarily it includes the hits left off the first disc. What's truly amazing, aside from the obvious improvements in technology, is that the quality of the recordings is identical.
The energy and the passion of the man hadn't changed an iota. His voice rings with the same authority in 1976 as it did in 1956 when he was burning up Chicago. There's nothing tired about his renditions of songs he'd probably performed thousands of times before; in fact there's a certain freshness that comes about from live performances that might have been lost in the studio.
Sometimes going back and hearing a performer's original recordings can be a disappointing experience. Either the sound quality is bad because of the time period they were made in, or they aren’t able to reproduce in studio what they could accomplish later in life on stage. That is definitely not the case with Muddy Waters or his recordings.
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