Call Me The Wolf: Howlin' Wolf 1969-1973

Koen writes: One of the greatest blues artists from the past is probably Chester ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett, who first recorded for Sam Phillips’ SUN Records and later for Leonard & Phil’s Chess Records with amazing results. His work can be easily found in the blogosphere, including two great compilations shared by Babs and Butterboy.

But these fantastic sets focus only on his early career’s songs, up to the mid-sixties.  If you look at Amazon, it isn’t any different, countless early work compilations of sometimes dubious origin and quality, a shame really. 

In fact, there has never been an official (or unofficial!) collection of his final years’ work!  Once I realized that a new JOKONKY project was born: Call Me The Wolf 1969-1973.

In this final years' time frame, Wolf released five albums, of which The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions is probably the most well-known, it even received a Deluxe treatment as a double CD with the original album plus alternate takes! Therefore I chose only one track, but it’s the classic Red Rooster, with Wolf explaining to Eric Clapton how it’s supposed to be done!

I remember vividly the first time I heard 1969’s The Howlin' Wolf Album, and was shocked, such a different take on those famous songs. Obviously I wasn’t alone, it got very bad reviews at the time and sales sucked.  Since then it has received a kind of re-appraisal and I’ve become more open-minded too ;-)

The spooky version of Moanin’ At Midnight deserves to be heard, it’s stunning! For the full-length Back Door Man I opted for a vinyl rip as that includes the spoken intro by Wolf, until now all CD versions of this album botched that up which resulted in 20+ seconds missing!

In the nineties, two Chess collections were released: a three-disc set The Chess Box and a two-disc Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog. The first one had the hits plus some unreleased work, the second focussed on alternate takes, single-only tracks, etc. Both featured a couple of (excellent!) songs from his later career which made these perfect for inclusion here!

Message To The Young is in many ways the most different album compared to his other recordings. Responsible for this were Sonny Thompson (piano, arranger, conductor, lyrics) and Cash McCall (producer, conductor). I selected 2 tracks that give a good indication of the rest of the album.

Live And Cookin' At Alice's Revisited gives us a chance to hear Wolf in a live setting with his regular band The Wolf Gang, brilliant. The Back Door Wolf is his final album and gathered good reviews, but not many people have heard it, I think.  From those last two albums I picked 3 tracks each.