recordings for the Chess label, the greatest single oeuvre in modern blues, languished on haphazard compilations and pricey imports until MCA initiated its current Chess reissue series. Muddy Waters: The Chess Box, a feast (six LPs, three cassettes or three CDs) of stone classics, vintage rarities and edifying curiosities, is the first comprehensive domestic Waters collection ever. That it's finally here is a gas. That no one bothered to do the job during Waters's lifetime ... well, that's why they call it the blues.

Hard-core blues nuts with deep pockets may grouse that The Chess Box is merely lip service compared with Muddy Waters (The Chess Box), the eleven-LP monster issued by P-Vine in Japan a few years back. But the seventy-two astutely chosen performances are more than ample testimony to the breadth of Waters's art. They vividly document not only the revolutionary qualities of Waters's electric blues inventions but the evolutionary odyssey of the blues itself as the music traveled upriver from Robert Johnson's Delta crossroads to Chicago, where émigrés like Waters married the desperate energies of the urban struggle to the timeless sound of black experience.

To that combustible equation Waters added force of personality: a potent compound of leonine pride, feral sexuality and sly wit graphically captured in the immortal 1954 hit "Hoochie Coochie Man," written by resident Chess tunesmith Willie Dixon and rendered by Waters with stunning autobiographical gusto. Waters first made blues history with his early-Forties recordings for the Library of Congress, so his consummate brand of blues power was already at an advanced stage when he cut his initial drummerless, small-group sides for Leonard and Phil Chess. Indeed, the first third of The Chess Box, covering 1947 to early 1954 and featuring early vinyl triumphs like "I Can't Be Satisfied," "Rollin' and Tumblin', Part I" and "Long Distance Call," is worth the cost of the entire set.

Particularly illuminating is the juxtaposition of Waters's own "Rolling Stone" (a major inspiration for a certain English band and a Bob Dylan hit – not to mention this magazine) with his dynamic reading of Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues." Both songs, first issued together as a 1950 single, bear the vital imprint of Waters's Delta roots. But Waters also displays a striking streetwise ferocity i