Various Folk Festival Of The Blues - Recorded Live (LP, 180g Vinyl, Ltd.)

(Vinyl Lovers) 10 Tracks

This editon presents a who's who of the Chicago blues from the1960s. Featured here ore such talents as Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, San, Boy Williamson II, and Willie Dixon, performing at the peak of their coreers. This WPOA live radio broadcast was emceed in the early 1960s by local disc jockey Big Bill Hill at Chicago's intimate Copocabona Club. (When the album was reissued in 1967, it wos retitled Blues from Big Bill's Copacabona.)

The legendary radio performonce was originally issued on Chess' subsidiary label Argo Outing the height of the folk music blues revival, and it hos remained loi,g unavailnble on vinyl. Each ortist was showcased with Buddy Guy's bond providing the accompaniment, plus Muckl,'s right hand mss, pianist Otis Spann. This is not the folk festival that one rnight expect, especially taking into consideration that the blues here are electric. This is s gritty live record of the most authentic elect', Chicago blues of the '60s. The combinotion of performances Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Boy in tandem with Waters would certainly checklist this one into the 'various artists' cutegory, but with half of the tracks here being fronted by Waters, it's clearly Muddy's show. His performances of -Got My Mojo Working', '(She's) 19 Years Old', 'Clouds in My Heart', 'Sitting and Thinking', and the vocal trio effort with Guy and 1.,:xon on the show opening 'Wee, Wee Baby' are nothing less than exemplary.

 'One of the greatest and certainly most underrated live Blues albums of all time. Unbelievably crude, raw and as real as it gets'  Cub Kodo (All Music Guide to Blues)

Although Big Bill announces the presence of Little Wolter and Sonny Boy Williamson on the alburn's intro, they were not actually present at the concert. Instead, the studio version of Williamson's 'Bring It on Home' (toped that some yeor) was included on the LP with dubbed applause. Gary Blailock

Original Album liner notes: One of the most gratifying ospeds of the recent groundswell of interest in America's folk music heritage has been the attention ond respect increasingly accorded the blues, one of the most viable and emotionally potent of all Afro-American folk music forms. Indicative of the growing widespread acceptance and appreciation of the blues have been its inclusion in all the important national jazz and folk music festivals of the past few years (Muddy Waters' best-selling Chess album Muddy Waters at Newport, recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, bears aural witness to this); the increasing inroads blues musicians hove lotely made in the coffee houses, concert holls and university auditoriums in which the folk music renaissance largely centers; the phenomenal success of the more and more frequent Europeon concert tours by such blues artists as Waters, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, and Big Joe Willioms (all of whom, by the way, departed for the Continent just a few weeks after this album wos recorded); and the serious attention being paid the rnusic and its practitioners by both European and American audiences and critics, on attention that has already resulted in several significant book-length studies of the blues.

The new wave of interest in the blues as an art form, - and on important one, at that - has given the music new impetus and new direction. Blues men who a few scant years ago were living in semi-obscurity, playing for o few dollars a night in rough-and-tumble clubs on Chicago's teeming South and West sides, are now lionized os international figures. Singer-pianists Memphis Slim, Curtis Jones and Champion Jack Dupree, for example, have been enabled to establish residence in Europe. And in those self-some Chicago clubs today one is as likely to find a university professor, any number of college students and their dates and several intense, wide-eyed young folk musicians listening raptly to Muddy's bond as he is the Negro working mon who hos always been the blues singer's primary audience. The music has not changed; Only the audience hos broadened somewhat.

This olbum is itself a case in point: on the sweltering late summer night it was recorded at the Copo Cabana, o rude, cavernous second floor hall-turned-nightclub on Chicago's West Side, a good number of folk music fans from the universities in the area were dotted throughout the audience.

The music, however, was refreshingly spontaneous and wholly unself-conscious in its direct, row power. It was first ond foremost music for doncing, and if it was at the some time 'folk music', so much the better. Surely Muddy, Otis, Wolf ond Buddy Guy were unmindful of such distindions, they were merely playing and singing os they always have, to and for the people they always hove, with all the flash and showmanship they could muster to mesmerize the crowd. Their success was apparent, from the first number the dance floor was pocked with flashing dancers.

This recording represents, to the best of my knowledge, a significant 'first, it is the very first time I know of that these men and their music have been caught by the microphones on location, performing for a demanding and appreciative audience of dancers on their home ground - at one of the clubs where today's blues live and flourish. The music is rude, strong, visceral and delivered with a steaming, relentless power, allowing for little in the way of tenderness, subtletly, obliquity or indirect social commentory. Yet, in its own passionate way it reflects the hard, fast, brutal realities of modern urban life and changed social conditions, of harsh ghetto living, snatched joys and simple, hard-won pleosures. To borrow a term from paintinc, this is genre music - that serves up a more thon generous slice of life.

It further offers a faithful picture of what may be nightly h.rd in the various small blues clubs scattered throughout Chicago. It is Buddy Guy's excellent little blues bond - featuring the leader's stunning guitor, in addition to piano, tenor and baritone saxophones, boss and drums that provides the backing for the vocals by the several guest artists who sit in (a very common proctice in the blues join. around the city).

Since the inception of his recording career in 1958, Louisiana-born Buddy Guy, now in his lots twenties, hos developed into one of the most exciting exponents of the fleet, multi-note modern blues guitar style formulated by, among others, T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. It is the latter whom Guy most closely resembles, however, both in the sloshing thrust of his instrumental lines and in the urgent, shouting intensity of his vocals, os may be heard here on his two seledions 'Worried Blues' (which features a stunning guitar introduction) and 'Don't Know Which Way to Go'.

The rotund, garrulous bassist Willie Dixon has long been a stalwort of the Chicago blues scene, os an instrumentalist, singer ond composer-arranger with a host of blues hits to his credit. It is his lusty singing that gets this set off to such a rousing start, as he leads the bond (and the audience singing) on the opening 'Wee, Wee Baby'.

Muddy Waters, thanks to his increasing appearances at such events as the Newport Jazz Festival and on such television specMls as Chicago's recent Jazz Supports the Symphony programs, as well as his European tours, in one of the best-known of contemporary blues artists. Born in Mississippi and raised in an agricultural community, Muddy (whose real name is McKinley Morgonfield) was initially recorded in Stovall, near Clarksdale by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1941, when the latter was in the area on a Library of Congress field trip. Moving north to Chicago in the mid 1940's, Muddy was one of the earliest country blues artists recorded by Aristocrat - later Chess Records and has since remained one of the most potent, emotionally stimulating and completely personal of latter-day blues singers. On his four selections herein, he is assisted by his long-time sidekick, pianist (and singer in his own right) Otis Spann, whose exultantly propulsive playing energizes most strongly the popular 'Got My Moio Working'.

Equally well-known among followers of the country blues is Chester Burnett, the Howlin' Wolf singer, guitarist and harmonica player (that's his earthly, blues-oozing horp heard on 'Sugor Mama', which also boosts a superbly ringing Guy guitar occompaniment), hailing from West Memphis, Arkansas. Wolf is a grippingly forceful singer, bringing a dark, brooding sense of anguish to his performances that is A) but overwhelming. He is one of the most active of Chicago-based blues men for his popularity in the rural South (testirnony to the fact that he has not lost touch with the fecund country blues traditions) keeps him always continually on the rood. Wolf, by the woy, was the sole representative of the blues troditions at lost year's International Jazz Festival in the notion's capitol.

Upon the brutal, senseless death of John Lee (Sonny Boy) Williamson in 1948, Rice Miller elected to continue the traditions of the popular singer-hormonica player, and began o career as Sonny Boy Williamson, No. 2. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, the second Sonny Boy began his recording career in 1951 for the Trumpet label based in that city, moving to Chicago and Checker Records soon after. His lozily insinuating singing and sharp, biting harmonica work ore heard here on 'Gonna Bring It on Home to You' Pete Welding