Chess Records Discoveries

You may have seen the movie. You might have bought the records. But there's still a lot to Chess that you just gotta hear. What better place to start than the song that many critics call the first rock 'n' roll record . . . ever? Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats — really Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm under a different name — tear up the studio with the sax-honkin', hard-boogie jump blues of "Rocket 88." With future Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White joining his trio, Ramsey Lewis swings gospel into a soulful groove in his instrumental version of "Wade In the Water." And jazz legend Miles Davis reportedly asked his keyboard man, Red Garland, to "play like this cat" after hearing Ahmad Jamal's trio live at the Pershing, where they cut the Gershwin standard "But Not for Me."

In Next Steps, we hear from a girl-group great, the guy who turned his name into a career, and a harp player who inspired a hard rockin' classic.

While Chess was best known for its blues, our Next Steps spotlights the label's remarkable range, from R&B to rock to pop. Never was a man's temper so perfectly matched to his music as in the barely concealed menace of Little Walter's "Boom, Boom Out Goes the Lights"; fortunately, he blows off his steam in a blast-furnace-blaze of a harmonica solo, spurred on by a slammin' backbeat. Self-styled "killer diller" Bo Diddley cackles and laughs his way through a Bo-by-Bo account of his rise to stardom in the auto-Bo-ographical shufflin' boogie of "The Story of Bo Diddley." And the Jaynetts turn to a very different myth — a British nursery rhyme — for the strangely haunting "Sally Go Round the Roses," their honey- (and echo-) drenched voices dripping funk while organist Artie Butler goes absolutely medieval on the keys.

In Deep Cuts, we open with a birthday card, follow it up with a Dear John letter, and close it out with a happy ending.

In our Deep Cuts, we've got some doo-wop, some gonna-whup, and one whopper of a hit. Not until Marilyn Monroe breathily sighed best wishes to President Kennedy did anyone even come close to out-sexying Tune Weavers lead singer Margo Sylvia in the birthday greetings department. In the doo-wop mini-drama of "Happy Happy Birthday Baby," Sylvia's sultry vocal slides around a sentimental serenade to her ex. making it realclear just what sort of a present she's offering. Speaking of exes, Rosco Gordon plans to inflict some old-school-style R&B pain in "Booted," threatening, "I'm gonna load my pistol, gonna sharpen my knife/I'm gonna get that man who got my wife." And Chuck Berry, in perhaps the cruelest blow ever dealt to a living rocker, managed to top the charts only once in his career. Was it with "Johnny B. Goode"? "Maybelline"? Nope, it's the sassy sing-along about his "cute little toy" — "My Ding-A-Ling."

Just about everybody who knows anything about music — or who's seen either of the recent movies about its history — knows Chess Records as Chicago's home base for the blues. Its roster — featuring Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Walter — reads like the inaugural class for the Blues Hall of Fame, and the label boasted its fair share of world-class rockers, including Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and more. But standing in the shadows of those giants, and hidden behind their massive mountain of hits, are a boatload of artists you need to hear, and songs by your favorite artists you probably never knew existed. We've been diggin' through the South Side crates and workin' our music-detecting mojo to bring you all the pieces you'll need to make your Chess collection reel, rock, and roll 'til the break of dawn.