In the sixties, The Rolling Stones slid the world a welter
of great singles and LPs, but the most profound thing they delivered was an awareness
of the blues that spread like a sweet, sweet virus. After hearing the Stones’
sometimes weedy, sometimes powerful remakes, white kids who’d never before
heard the names Muddy, Howlin’, or Slim suddenly got hip to what had already
been happening in the music world for some twenty years.
While giving the Stones too much credit is totally
patronizing to the artists who helped them a hell of a lot more than Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards ever helped anyone else, they are probably the best white rockers to
curate a collection like Confessin’ the
Blues. Many of the songs Mick and Keith chose for this double-disc set are numbers the Stones
covered during their most vital decade: the title track by Jay McShann &
Walter Brown, Muddy Waters’s “I Want to Be Loved” and “I Just Want to Make Love
to You”, Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee”, Howlin’ Wolf’s “The Red Rooster”, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain Blues”, Jimmy
Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City”, Amos Milburn’s “Down the Road Apiece”, etc.
Appropriately, a song they didn’t play but appropriated in a significant way
begins the set. While neither Chuck Berry nor Bo Diddley were strictly blues
artists, they were signed to the crucial home of Chicago blues, Chess Records,
and highly inspirational to the boys, so key numbers such as “Carol” and “Mona”
makes appearances too.
Ultimately, the Stones-connection is a bit of window
dressing since most of these tracks were not in that band’s repertoire and
since you will forget all about Mick, Keith, and Charlie as soon as the
opening bars of “Rollin’ Stone” start grinding. Essentially, Confessin’ the Blues is a fine starter
blues compilation, at least in terms of the track selection. The excessively
trebly sound does little service to the depth of these records.
