That voice! Who on earth sang like that! It was a huge voice, raw and raspy and conveying every imaginable human emotion with astonishing intensity and conviction. As much as I loved Berry’s and Diddley’s fantastic rock ‘n roll, and as enthralled as I was by Muddy’s Mississippi Delta-by-way-of-Chicago hoodoo blues, it was the Wolf who stunned me. They were especially right about Howlin’ Wolf. So I dutifully bought albums by all of them: Mick, Keith, Brian, Bill, and Charlie couldn’t be wrong. My musical heroes from London couldn’t stop raving about artists like Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Howlin’ Wolf. I first heard the album some 40 years ago, as kid in his early teens who had acquired, thanks mainly to the Stones, a passion for the blues. Here’s a partial list: the Doors, Cream, the Who, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, the Grateful Dead, the Pointer Sisters, Koko Taylor, the White Stripes, Lucinda Williams, and especially the Rolling Stones, who covered two of its tracks, “Little Red Rooster” and “Little Baby”. It is one of the greatest blues records ever made, as well as an ur-text for many rock and R&B artists. But it has the stylistic unity and focus of a recording conceived as a whole. Rocking Chair - as I will call it from here on–comprises tracks recorded from 1957 to 1961, most of which were released as singles. But everyone, or at least every serious blues aficionado, knows this collection of 12 tracks by Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett simply as “the rocking chair album”. Chess Records titled the disk Howlin’ Wolf when the Chicago-based company released it in 1962. In fact, the album has come to be known by its cover art. But that image has become iconic because of the extraordinary music inside the unremarkable packaging. You could hardly ask for a more nondescript album cover. An acoustic guitar and a rocking chair, set against a green background.
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