Within five seconds of the first time I heard Howlin’ Wolf open his mouth on record, I was a fan. I had an instant reaction to that powerful voice, a monstrous rumble that sounded bigger than the voice of God, but filled with human emotion that was bursting at the seams. This was a man who had something to say and wasn’t afraid to say it. 

I bought a cheap double-album collection of his recordings, a record that I cherished as much as any I ever bought, one of those many Chess re-issue series releases that flooded the market. This one had a ridiculous cartoon cover of the Wolf dressed as a fighter pilot, riding on the outside of an airplane into an orange and pink sky. Chess did stuff like this a lot, going to the well over and over again, releasing the same classic recordings but packaged in different sleeves, with a revised song selection. I think I got lucky on that cheap two-fer, because it had all of the Howlin’ Wolf tunes that I loved. The only problem was that it messed up my perception of how his catalogue came to be in the first place. I didn’t know the original Howlin’ Wolf albums that Chess released in the late fifties and early sixties, albums that were the source for most of the songs on my beloved double album, and since that neat package contained the mother lode, I didn’t need to explore much further. Even when the three-disk “Chess Box” came out, I was slow to purchase it, and when I did, I found that it added only nominally to my appreciation of the Wolf. 

Now, I can’t recommend that you search out that double album with the dumb cartoon cover, because I never saw it for sale anywhere since. These days, there must be literally hundreds of similar compilations, though, pulling together some variety of Howlin’ Wolf’s best material. Or, another way to do it is to pick up his rather scant catalog of original albums. His first two releases on Chess (“Moanin’ I the Moonlight” and the “Rocking Chair” album, from 1959 and 1962, respectively) are now packaged together on a single disk and represent the core of his catalog releases, but they don’t tell the full story. 

By 1966, the British Blues scene had exploded all over America, leaving no stone unturned for source material that came from the United States. Chess Records had witnessed something that would have been unimaginable just two years earlier. White kids were suddenly interested in hearing music by these elder statesmen of the blues, because virtually every English rock and roll band had been recycling their songs with wimpier, hyperactive versions of the real thing. Chess had the real thing. I don’t know why they waited two years to react, but in 1966, they released a series of “Real Folk Blues” albums that compiled some old and some recent recordings of the legendary artists on their roster. For chronologists, these albums are a bit of a disaster, as they randomly throw together tracks from a variety of sources and time periods, with no creditable information or liner notes to sort out the what, where, when or who. Still, all of them qualified as reasonably representative assemblages of the artist’s work. 

The Howlin’ Wolf release stood out because it was not redundant, containing twelve tracks that had not yet seen album release. Many of the songs were recorded in 1964 or later, with the plus-sized Willie Dixon providing material that suited the equally large Wolf perfectly, adding a sly twinkle to his roar (“Built for Comfort” and “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy”). My advice is that you get the first two albums and this set, or you can get a good compilation instead, or you can get one of the comprehensive box sets. Either way, you won’t go wrong. 

January 1966 - Billboard: Did Not Chart