The Blues Never Die!

Recorded in Chicago in 1965, this session paired pianist Otis Spann - the longtime anchor of Muddy Waters's band - with harmonica player and singer James Cotton, another key member of that same group, backed by additional Waters sidemen drawn from the club date circuit around Pepper's Lounge on the city's South Side. By the mid-1960s Spann had spent more than a decade as one of the most in-demand session and bandstand pianists in Chicago blues, prized for a touch that was both percussive and deeply lyrical, and this date let him step forward as leader and vocalist on his own compositions alongside a handful of covers, including Elmore James's slide-guitar staple and a Muddy Waters standard. The program mixes originals credited to Spann and Cotton with blues repertoire staples, giving both men ample room to stretch out as singers in a relaxed, in-the-pocket small-group setting that mirrored the sound of a typical late-night set at the club where they worked. The album captures a particularly fertile stretch for Chicago's postwar blues community, when the music associated with the Waters band was reaching wider audiences through folk and blues festival bookings even as the core players kept their working rapport sharp in nightly performance. Critics at the time praised the record's unforced, idiomatic feel and singled out Spann's playing as some of his most satisfying on record, cementing his reputation as a stylistic descendant of the pre-war barrelhouse and boogie-woogie pianists transplanted into the electric Chicago idiom. It remains valued today as one of the most purely enjoyable latter-day documents of the Muddy Waters band's rhythm section working on its own terms, and a high point in Spann's discography as a leader.