Sun Years [Import]

Howlin' Wolf | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 20, 2000)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Blues Factory
• ASIN: B00004TY1W
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,257 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. How Many More Years

2. Smile at Me

3. My Baby Walked Off

4. My Troubles and Me

5. Everybody's in the Mood

6. Bluebird

7. Well That's All Right

8. Baby Ride with Me

9. California Boogie

10. Look a Here Baby

11. Mr. Highway Man

12. Chocolate Drop

13. Color and Kind

14. Dorothy Mae

15. Decoration Day

16. Oh Red

17. Drinkin' C. V. Wine

18. My Last Affair

19. Come Back Home

20. California Blues

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Howlin' good collection!, March 24, 2002

By 

Lee Hartsfeld (Central Ohio, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sun Years (Audio CD)

This 20-track collection of Sun-label Howlin' Wolf boasts great music, superb sound, straightforward (if not overly-literate) biographical info in the liner notes, a feast of photos, and an economical price. Most of the tracks boast in-the-studio fidelity, including the wonderful alternate take of "How many more years," which is obviously mastered (and very well) from disk. Recording dates would have been nice (these hail from 1951 and 1952), but you can't have everything. No complaints from this customer.

This CD features Howlin' Wolf at his jazziest and refreshingly removed from the manufactured Delta sound the man is so much better known for from his Chicago days. No doubt, Wolf will be forever described in print as primitive and raw and primeval and Stone Age, and so on, but there's little that's primitive about these swinging, extended-chord-driven numbers, in spite of their speaker-taxing intensity and drive. Dig the whole-tone dominant-9th progression (gloriously distorted) that opens "Chocolate Drop" and which reemerges in the first instrumental chorus as quarter-note vs. eighth-note triplets. Marvel at the superbly smooth Willie Johnson lead-in to "Come Back Home" and the beautifully assured syncopation of "Everybody's In the Mood," a tune borrowed from, er, inspired by Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." Back door men and rural-style metaphors for procreative activity would have to wait a couple of years; at Sun, Wolf was too busy being in the groove. Too bad he couldn't have stayed there. This is, by far, his best material, which is another way of saying the blues don't get any better than this. For God's sake, buy this!