The quality of the recordings is great and the digitalization process has managed to capture every last little nuance originally laid down by these great musicians. At the same time, Muddy had already had enough life experience to give these songs an authenticity that would have been lacking in a younger man's performance.
He can sing about events, life, love, and death with authority, having experienced all of them in some form or another. Although I have a feeling his voice would have had those ringing tones even when he was a younger man, that quality is only substantiated by the years its seen.
On his most recent album, Crow Jane Alley, Willy DeVille has a song called "Muddy Waters Rose Out Of The Mississippi Mud," which even if you were inclined to take literally as being about the river flooding from the title, once you listened, it was obvious the song was about somebody. Not just anybody either, but somebody pretty damn special from the way Willy sounds when he's singing.
Special is the right word for the Muddy Waters Willy describes as rising out of the murk of the Mississippi river. Listen to one track of Muddy singing the Blues and you hear exactly the connection that Willy is talking about. Muddy's voice was born out of the earth that was the Deep South of the United States in the twenties and thirties. Even though he recorded all his music up North, the experience of living that life was reflected in the passion and soul of his Blues music.
They Call Me Muddy Waters gives the listener an opportunity to experience that well of passion and see how it was sustained for the entirety of Muddy Water's career. This is a great retrospective of one of the most important Blues singers of the twentieth century.
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