Search - Howlin' Wolf, Howlin Wolf :: Sun Years

Howlin' good collection!

Lee Hartsfeld | Central Ohio, United States | 03/25/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This 20-track collection of Sun-label Howlin' Wolf boasts great music, superb sound, straightforward (if not overly-literate) biographical info in the liner notes, a feast of photos, and an economical price. Most of the tracks boast in-the-studio fidelity, including the wonderful alternate take of "How many more years," which is obviously mastered (and very well) from disk. Recording dates would have been nice (these hail from 1951 and 1952), but you can't have everything. No complaints from this customer.

This CD features Howlin' Wolf at his jazziest and refreshingly removed from the manufactured Delta sound the man is so much better known for from his Chicago days. No doubt, Wolf will be forever described in print as primitive and raw and primeval and Stone Age, and so on, but there's little that's primitive about these swinging, extended-chord-driven numbers, in spite of their speaker-taxing intensity and drive. Dig the whole-tone dominant-9th progression (gloriously distorted) that opens "Chocolate Drop" and which reemerges in the first instrumental chorus as quarter-note vs. eighth-note triplets. Marvel at the superbly smooth Willie Johnson lead-in to "Come Back Home" and the beautifully assured syncopation of "Everybody's In the Mood," a tune borrowed from, er, inspired by Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." Back door men and rural-style metaphors for procreative activity would have to wait a couple of years; at Sun, Wolf was too busy being in the groove. Too bad he couldn't have stayed there. This is, by far, his best material, which is another way of saying the blues don't get any better than this. For God's sake, buy this!"