Chester Burnett was already going by Howlin' Wolf, a name he'd carried since the late 1940s, by the time he walked into Sam Phillips' Memphis studio in 1951. Chess Records took him from there and paired him with songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon, who supplied key pieces of the catalog alongside plenty of songs Burnett wrote himself. This 20-track set pulls from those Chess sessions, the recordings that set the vocabulary later generations of rock and blues players borrowed wholesale. No frills here, just the tracks that did the actual shaping.
