album of the week
"electric mud"
muddy waters
1968
I Just Want To Make Love To You
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man
Let's Spend The Night Together
She's All Right
I'm A Man (Mannish Boy)
Herbert Harper's Free Press
Tom Cat
The Same Thing
Electric Mud, a 1968 album by Muddy Waters, is considered variously as a groundbreaking experiment, a travesty against the blues, and/or a commercial sell-out.
Riding the wave of the folk-rock boom of the 1960s as well as a revived interest in the original form spurred by the success of blues-based rockers such as The Rolling Stones, Waters had found a mainstream white audience after more than two decades of jukebox race music hits on Chess Records and playing the Chicago blues club circuit. In an attempt to capitalize on this new popularity, producer Marshall Chess (son of label founder and owner Leonard Chess) convinced Waters to move away from the traditional acoustic and blues styles he had become famous for and "modernize" his sound. Chess brought in a host of studio musicians and worked up Jimi Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock arrangements of several Waters classics, some new material, and a cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together".
