When he died in 1983 at the age of sixty-eight, McKinley Morganfield was possibly the best-known bluesman in the world. Yet the notoriety of the onetime Mississippi plantation hand known as Muddy Waters is due largely to his overwhelming influence on a pivotal generation of rockers – Sixties wild boys like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter – who covered his tunes, hot-wired his sound and assumed, to varying degrees, his inimitable style of barnyard machismo. Meanwhile, Waters's own landmark 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 odys