Chess Records celebrates 75 years

Museums, like the past they preserve, aren't for everyone. To some they are essential and endlessly enlightening, while others find them irrelevant and boring.

- BY ROBERT BAIRD

Music listeners tend to divide into those who only want to hear what's new and those who refuse to get out of the past. Today, the blues qualify as a museum piece. While an endless stream of weekend-warrior blues bands still grinds away across the US, nothing new and different has happened in the music in many years, Buddy Guy's well-deserved 2026 Grammy Award notwithstanding. Blues is a music in which—similar perhaps to classical music, its stylistic opposite—the biggest stars and talents are long past. Yet the holdings of the blues museum are endlessly rich, and blues is the foundation for jazz and rock'n'roll—America's most influential and far-reaching contributions to world culture. So reliving its history is essential for understanding American popular music and much more.

2026 is the 50th anniversary of a bicentennial annum that will always loom large in blues lore: It's the year when three giants of the genre—Howlin' Wolf (January 10, 1976), Jimmy Reed (August 29), and Freddie King (December 28)—moaned their last raw phrase or bent their last triumphant note.

The first name on that list was recently celebrated with the launch of the Chess 75 Acoustic Sound Series, along with three other deserving blues artists. A collaboration between UME and Analogue Productions, these $40, 180gm LPs were, according to official paperwork, remastered from original analog tapes. They're pressed at QRP—the pressing plant owned by Acoustic Sounds—and come in tip-on jackets of heavy coated stock.