Various: Chess Pieces (the Very Best of Chess Records)

I've had this double album on my iPod shuffle for the past month. I bought it earlier this year on the basis that Lucy had got me a copy of Rich Cohen's The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll and it didn't make sense to read the book without having access to the music that I assumed the book would cover.

I took both book and iPod with me on my holiday to Sjusjøen last month. The book is excellent, an absorbing social history that stretches from Polish Jews emigrating to Chicago through to the Black Power movement. But Cohen pares back the musical detail to focus on the individual and urban history, so he focuses on Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley — basically the Mississippi bluesmen — and glosses much of the rest of the Chess catalogue. The book doesn't mention a couple of my favourites from this collection: the jazz version of Wade in the Water by the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and Billy Stewart's unhinged Summertime. Neither does it mention the later stuff like Solomon Burke, or many of the women performers (except to say that Etta James was hard to handle).

Hey, Ben, I nearly didn't mention Clarence 'Frogman' Henry. I'm sure you can't have forgotten how, when we were living in Cosin Court, you 'discovered' him through buying some oddball compilation cassette from Woolworths for two quid (I think you might have bought it because it had Charley Rich's Most Beautiful Girl in the World on it). When Clarence croaks his way through "I'm going to sing like a frog", it sounded to us like a great novelty record to us at the time, as it must have done when it came out. Then, later, you found a Clarence Frogman Henry 'best of' album — also a bargain — and we were astonished to find that it didn't have his signature 'frog' song on it. Like an Archies greatest hits without Sugar, Sugar. Rest assured that on Ain't Got No Home, the song included here, Clarence sings like a frog.

Meanwhile, though I enjoyed the book and the music, the holiday wasn't an unmitigated success. I am still nursing the elbow I fractured on my second day on skis.

MusicBrainz entry for this album