Japanese only SHM-CD (Super High Material CD - playable on all CD players) pressing. Universal. 2008.

The biography of Sonny Boy Williamson is something of an enigma, even to ardent blues fans. Indeed, he isn't even the "real" Williamson; a shrewd businessman simply gave singer-mouth harpist Aleck "Rice" Miller the name after the 1948 murder of popular blues artist John Lee Williamson. Still, Miller/Williamson's remarkable career literally bridged Robert Johnson and Eric Clapton, both his music and life embodying a free-wheeling, hard-living lifestyle that became something of a rock and blues cliché. After considerable local radio success in the Delta, Miller/Williamson ended up at Chicago's Chess Records in the mid-1950s, where all but one of these two dozen tracks originated in the early '60s. But by the time Chess originally issued the first of these ill-timed collections (belatedly compiled to cash in on a waning '60s folk boom), Williamson was six months dead. Listen and it's not hard to hear why a generation or two of blues-smitten rockers held him especially dear, be it the Allmans (the original "One Way Out," with longtime partner Robert Lockwood Jr. supplying the familiar guitar licks) or Zeppelin (a lugubrious, boogied-up take of Willie Dixon's "Bring It On Home"). Punctuated by harp blasts that could turn from sharply staccato to lyrically wrenching, Williamson's leathery voice muses over his being "Too Young to Die" or "Too Old to Think" with the self-deprecating indifference that became a trademark. Though these tracks are the cream of his last years, they're more boozy celebration than elegy. --Jerry McCulley

When John Lee Williamson died in 1948 in Chicago at age 34, he was at his peak of fame, having recently scored a smash with Shake the Boogie . Who knows what he would have gone on to do; but in his time, he managed to become the most influential blues harmonica man of them all. Here are Shake the Boogie and his posthumous hit Better Cut That Out plus Stop Breaking Down; Mean Old Highway; What's Gettin' Wrong with You; Sloppy Drunk Blues; Check Up on My Baby Blues; Early in the Morning; Hoodoo Hoodoo; Honey Bee Blues; My Little Machine; Shotgun Blues 104 tracks including many with Big Joe Williams and Yank Rachell!