life, the contemporary black experience and the healing powers of music into unforgettable pop playlets are a continuing influence on everyone and everything passing in his wake.
Blues auteur Willie Dixon is hardly short on whys and wherefores in meriting his own box either. Thirty-six of them are present and accounted for in this set, among them "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Spoonful," "Back Door Man," "Little Red Rooster," "Seventh Son" and "Wang Dang Doodle." Dixon composed them all; he also doubled on some as producer and bassist. An infrequent performer, Dixon spread his signature over a virtual library of classic singles by his distinguished clients (including Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor and Little Walter) during his 1951-69 tenure at Chess. Featuring the best and the most famous of those sides on three LPs (two cassettes or CDs), Dixon's box is an exhilarating if belated salute to a remarkable career, a Blues' Greatest Hits in all but name.
On first inspection, the Berry box, too, looks like nothing but hits. In fact, at his late-Fifties chart peak, Berry had only five Top Ten singles, and his sole Number One was the 1972 toilet-joke sing-along "My Ding-a-Ling." But if a hit can be defined not just by sales but by its lasting imprint on the audience that hears it and the art to which it aspires, The Chess Box is a monument to the musical durability of Berry's jaunty country-blues style (gassed up by ace sidemen like pianist Johnnie Johnson and drummer Fred Below) and the vibrant immediacy of his wordplay. Few songwriters have encapsulated the power and allure of rock & roll better than Berry ("I caught the rollin' arthritis sittin' down at a rhythm revue" – "Roll Over Beethoven") or captured its sexual potency with such wry, pithy humor ("If it's a slow song/We'll omit it/If it's a rocker/That'll get it.... C'mon, Queenie, let's get with it" – "Little Queenie").
As a black man enjoying white adulation, Berry in a very real way also equated rock & roll with his own pursuit of the American dream. Substitute "colored boy" for "country boy" in "Johnny B. Goode" (as Berry originally wrote it), and you basically have the story of Berry Made Good. True, Berry suffered from his success, doing jail time on a dubious Mann Act conviction at the height of the first wave of antirock hysteria. The hits were fewer after
