In the early sixties, Chess kept its crosshairs on the emerging folkie scene, hoping it might be a market for the label's blues artists who boasted the kind of "authenticity" that was grade-A currency to the coffee house set. If Muddy Waters's Folk Singer was a testing of waters, then those waters must have been warm and inviting enough for Chess to launch its Real Folk Blues series. Muddy, always the first name in blues, was to get the series rolling in 1965, with a second installment, devoted to Howlin' Wolf, following that same year.
While Folk Singer consisted of new recordings, old singles formed the bulk of both inaugural volumes of The Real Folk Blues. Conscientiously, there was zero overlap between Chess' previous Waters compilation, the objectively essential Best of Muddy Waters. As jam-packed with classics as that 1958 disc was, there were still plenty of key sides from the era it covered to justify the first Real Folk Blues record. "Rollin' and Tumblin'", "Walkin' Blues", "Forty Days and Forty Nights", and "You Can't Lose What You Never Had" are some of Waters's most famous recordings. "Mannish Boy" is arguably his signature one. There isn't a bum track on the album, whether he's backed by a band or using the most spartan arrangement of solo guitar and bass on "Walkin' Blues", "Canary Bird", and "Little Geneva".
Unlike Muddy Waters, who had a couple of proper studio albums under his belt by 1965, Howlin' Wolf's entire LP output to that point was of the compilation variety. This limited the number of big hits on his Real Folk Blues, but the record still earns its keep by avoiding LP-overlap, just as Waters's had. And the two big hits on it—the oft-covered "Killing Floor" and "Sitting on Top of the World"—are pretty damn big. The rest may be less known, but they maintain the quality of the hits with exuberant backing and Wolf's Buzz Buzzard belting. Biggest revelations: the infectiously danceable, nearly James Brown-like "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy" and "Ooh Baby, Hold Me". This is a joyful document of how punchy the urban blues can get.
Such a record deserves a complimentarily punchy presentation. Fortunately Chess' Acoustic Sound Series has already set a standard for that kind of presentation. Nevertheless, a disclosure is necessary: although the Howlin' Wolf disc sports the series' standard hype sticker declaring that it was "Mastered from the original analog tapes," and the sleeve indicates nothing otherwise, mastering engineer Matthew Lutthans revealed on the Steve Hoffman Forum that it was actually pulled from digital sources. In his posts, Lutthans suggested that those digital sources simply sound better than the available analog ones.
This will raise eyebrows among staunch purists, but even they will have to admit that Howlin' Wolf's Real Folk Blues sounds pretty damn great, with clear details, velvety bass tones, and sufficient warmth. In fact, it sounds a little better than the Waters album. This is partially down to the age of the material, so it would be unfair to point out the hiss on 1949's "Canary Bird" or the touch of grime around the vocal of 1955's "Mannish Boy", recorded two years before the earliest cuts on the Wolf disc. I'm sure that such issues are down to the sources, and I've seen no evidence that anything but analog ones were used for the Muddy Waters record. However, I did find the bass a tad more overbearing on his entry in the Real Folk Blues series than it is on Wolf's.
Nevertheless, and with all matters of sources considered, both albums sound excellent. The Waters vinyl does seem to be cut a little better than the Wolf one, which has the same issues with inner groove distortion when not using a mono cartridge or switch that I've noticed on other entries in Chess' Acoustic Sounds series. This issue was less pronounced on the Muddy Waters album, but again, using the proper equipment to play these mono records yields superb sound from the edge of the discs all the way to their run-out grooves.
