epilogue
Music & Literature
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
Fathers and Sons
by Muddy Waters
Speaking of the blues: Brits like Clapton
and John Mayall drove their fans back to
listening to the real deal — the guys they
were sometimes so palely imitating — and
by 1968 my brother and I were driving my
father out of the house with albums like
B.B. King: Live and Well, The Late Fantastically Great Elmore James, and Taj Mahal’s The Natch’l
Blues, but Muddy Waters’ Fathers and Sons in 1969 was
a blow-off-the-roof revelation of just how much passionate exultation could be added to the amount of pain the
blues were intended to express: one studio disc and one
live with an all-star band including Michael Bloomfield
and Otis Spann and Paul Butterfield and Duck Dunn and
Sam Lay and Buddy Miles. The live half, the album cover
informed us, was recorded at The Super Cosmic Joy-Scout
Jamboree and featured a two-part forest fire of a version
of “Got My Mojo Working” that I might cite
on a short list of reasons to live.
A 25th Anniversary Show
Business Salute to Ray Charles
I’d grown up listening to Ray Charles — my
father and his best friend were both fans,
so that at any point during my childhood
I might go from hearing The Music Man to
Earl Wrightson to “Hit the Road, Jack” —
but it was only when I came across this ABC/
Atlantic compilation double album from
1971 that I realized he was the greatest and most influential vocalist in pop history. If you imagine a spectrum on