Muddy Waters - Can't Be Satisfied: The Very Best of Muddy Waters 1947-1975

Can’t Be Satisfied is a richly satisfying journey through Muddy’s career. Featuring influential classics, powerful rarities and more, there are enough certified blues standards to keep the Rolling Stones in business for their next three albums. Also included, is a comprehensive booklet highlighted with authorative notes alongside unseen photos from the Chess vaults.

Proceedings commence in 1947 with the single, “Gypsy’ Woman”, before the compilation shifts through the next 3 decades. Moving through the ‘50s where Muddy, with Willie Dixon on bass, came to define Chicago Blues with classics such as “I’m Ready”, “Mannish Boy”, “Sugar Sweet”, “I Got My Mojo Working” and “You Shook Me”. We then enter the 1960s where Muddy and psychedelia came together on the much-debated Electric Mud album and also After The Rain which features “Screamin’ And Crying’’ on this here collection. The old blues and the blues influenced new rock movement came together on 1969’s Fathers And Sons double LP which was Muddy’s biggest selling album for Chess and saw him joined by the likes of Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Donald Duck Dunn as wonderfully captured here with the inclusion of “Long Distance Cal”.

1971’s Live at Mr. Kelly’s (from which “Country Boy” and “Blow Wind Blow” are taken) was another success, as was The London Muddy Waters Sessions (“Young Fashioned Ways”), released in 1973, which essentially took the premise of Fathers And Sons and moved the location to England with British musicians like Steve Winwood, Rory Gallagher, Ric Grech and Mitch Mitchell on board.

The Can’t Get No Grindin’ album arrived in the same year but after almost three decades together the relationship between Muddy and Chess Records (which had been bought by GRT and no member of the Chess family still worked there) had run its course and the two parted ways in 1976. Muddy left the ailing label on a high, however. His last Chess album, Muddy Waters’ Woodstock Album (‘Let the Good Times Roll’) gaining him a Grammy.

Muddy Waters is, along with Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and B.B King, for many the foremost representative of blues music within modern pop culture. Muddy has been parodied in Family Guy, has been heard all over the filmography of Martin Scorcese, and with the album Electric Mud, has had a huge influence on hip hop with the likes of Gorillaz, The Roots, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill all taking from it. The mega-bands of the 1960s and 1970s – The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin et al – simply wouldn’t have sounded like they do if Muddy Waters hadn’t jumped on the Greyhound Bus to Chicago in the early 1940s in search of his destiny.