Blue Sky Records Stereo
This final document from the end of his storied career is a blend of studio tracks that were not quite finished for what would have been his third album with Johnny Winter at the helm, plus a few additional tracks from the previous two years' sessions. While this did not garner the acclaim on its initial release that the other 2 albums did, it may actually, in its remastered form, be the best of the bunch. Haunting in a way that Johnny Cash's last album is, this is the sound of a man who knows he has come to the end of the crossroads, as it were.
From the previous sessions you have the full band at full throttle and the intensity is devastating. From the uncompleted sessions, the songs are more introspective, more intimate, perhaps truer to his cotton field roots than he had been in a very long time, and they are positively spiritual. But what trily sets this apart are the final two bonus cuts that somehow wrap and sum up the legacy of Muddy Waters: "I Can't Go On" and "Clouds in My Eyes" are so upsetting because these are in fact his very last songs recorded. They are his best as well. Odd that inadvertently he would save the very best for last, but these two songs will haunt your soul much as Cash's rendition of "Hurt" does. Columbia and Johnny Winter and the remastering team have done the world of music a very great service in preserving and restoring these tracks.
Bob Margolin penned intimate and heartfelt liner notes for each of these reissues that are so to the point that they bring you inside the world that Muddy lived. For this last session, they all knew the end was near and somehow drew strength in spite of the oncoming sorrow from their leader's bravery and integrity and deep down grit. Muddy Waters was an ontological and existential hero of the first order, and his coda is as powerful a departing testament as Beethoven's last string quartet, as Tchaikovsky No 6, as Mahler's 9th. This is African American Blues-Gospel-Spiritual requiem in all its soulful acquiescence to a more powerful Creator. Positively, this was both his most intimate and his most powerful collection of music and it will haunt you the rest of your life.
By o dubhthaigh
Side 1.
1. I'm A King Bee 3:52
2. Too Young To Know 4:30
3. Mean Old Frisco Blues 3:47
4. Forever Lonely 4:35
5. I Feel Like Going Home 3:42
Side 2.
6. Champagne & Reefer 4:38
7. Sad Sad Day 5:25
8. (My Eyes) Keep Me In Trouble 3:17
9. Deep Down In Florida #2 4:10
10. No Escape From The Blues 2:04
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