4CD box set charting the ascendance of the blues’ most distinctive voice. O-wooo!

Chester ‘Howling Wolf’ Burnett never did make an easy fit for the world, at least not until he became an overnight sensation at the age of 42, bursting onto the post-war blues scene to claim his place as one of the music’s titans, a status time has only enhanced. His primal growl arrived as a force of nature – “This is where the soul of man never dies” producer Sam Phillips famously declared. No-one has ever sounded like Wolf, before or since.

The 97 tracks here document only the first decade of his recording career, and even then there are omissions from his tangled start – the sessions he cut for other labels – but they confirm him as a “true blues immortal” as Dick Shurman puts it in his liner notes. Present are only a clutch of the sides that branded a generation of Brit and U.S. bluesers and which they duly made into standards in the 1960s – the crooked lope of “Smokestack Lightning”, the hypnotic “Spoonful”, the forlorn “Sitting On Top Of The World” – but the extras and alternate takes amount to a serious treat. The whole package is delivered with restrained good taste, with a slew of evocative pictures and graphics, and a brace of classy essays, Peter Guralnick being the other scribe present. The crucible of 1950s Southside Chicago is brought to bubbling life.

One thing that springs from those black and white photos is the sheer exuberance of Wolf, a hulking giant who was nonetheless always dapper. There’s an odd disconnect between his artful tie-pins and geniality and that gravel pit of a voice and the pain and anguish it conveys, a disjunction explained by his early life. The 1950s were a time of happiness and success for Wolf. The self-destructive ways of many of his peers were never a temptation. He was financially astute and happily married. Yet he remained stubborn and suspicious, and the scars of his previous life clearly ran deep: a troubled, dirt poor childhood in Mississippi that included estrangement from his mother, hard graft on his father’s farm, an unhappy spell in the army, the grinding life of an itinerant bluesman in the segregated south.

To the young Wolf, only music made sense of the world. The mentoring role of Charlie Patton, whom the twenty year old Wolf met in 1930, when Patton was top draw on the delta blues scene, was pivotal in shaping what followed. Wolf’s “Saddle My Pony”, for example, is a direct descendant of Patton’s “Pony Blues” and “Smokestack Lightning” itself is modeled on Patton’s “Moon Going Down”.

It’s astonishing it took so long for Wolf to get recorded – he was a celebrated performer first in Mississippi, then in Memphis, where he relocated. It took Sam Phillips, a visionary contemptuous of the south’s segregation code, to put him on disc, licensing tracks cut in his Memphis studio to Chess in Chicago. A third of what’s here originated with Phillips, who always cited Wolf as the purest, most instinctive talent of a roster that includes Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and B.B. King.` Wolf’s decampment to Chicago and Chess in 1954 hurt Phillips badly.

Philips’ faith in Wolf was instantly rewarded when “Moaning At Midnight”/“How Many More Years” became a double-headed number one on the R&B charts. Both still sound bitingly fresh, setting Wolf’s buzz-saw vocals – punctuated by that trademark falsetto howl – and droning harp against the dazzle of Willie Johnson’s guitar, a mix of delta picking, T-Bone Walker be-bop, and proto power chords. Because microphones overloaded under the sheer power of Wolf’s voice, his rasp emerged as electrified as Johnson’s guitar, a delivery that was later imitated by DJ Wolfman Jack and Captain Beefheart.

It took Wolf a couple of years and a move to Chicago – he proudly drove there in his own station wagon – to top his debut. “Smokestack Lightning” and the menacing “Evil” surely did so, with “Baby How Long” another contender. Nonetheless the mid to late 1950s represent a lull in Wolf’s output after his spectacular arrival. Chess, flush with the success of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, could afford to let him freewheel. Wolf recorded mostly self-written originals; simple songs about the pain of betrayed lovers, a parade of heartache, broken homes and his baby buying a train ticket “as long as my right arm”. Yet Wolf was capable of delicious irony on say, “Sitting On Top Of The World” (“She’s gone but I don’t worry”), and in “The Natchez Burning” he wrote a famous memorial for the 200 clubgoers killed in a 1940 Chicago fire.

What moved things on from routine fare like ”That’s Alright” and “Rockin’ Daddy” was in part the quality of his sidemen. The young Hubert Sumlin, (who died December 4th 2011) summoned from Memphis, quickly developed the piercing riffs and curlicued solos that became a signature of Wolf’s later output (try “I’m Leaving”), and which made him a hero to the likes of Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Chess sessioneers included outstanding players like pianists Otis Spann and Hosea Lee Kennard – the latter’s hammering keyboard elevates the second half of this collection – while bassist Willie Dixon was a prize songwriter and arranger. Another relocated southerner, Dixon had supplied Wolf with “Evil” before a fall-out with the Chess brothers over money. When he returned he hit a dazzling streak that included “Wang Dang Doodle”, “ Back Door Man” and “Spoonful” – a trinity that closes this compilation – and later “Little Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious” among others.

Discs three and four, with their flurries of out-takes and studio banter, give a pungent taste of how these masterpieces were created; with a mixture of tiresome persistence, exceptional skill and pure love for a music that was so often about being unloved.

Neil Spencer

Second collection of old-school country and western covers from Norah Jones and co. ..By sheer dint of the fact she plays the piano and occasionally dips into the Great American Songbook, Norah Jones finds herself marketed as a lounge jazz singer, a category error compounded by the fact that her sales have all but bankrolled the Blue Note label for more than a decade. Of course, she’ll be the first to admit that she’s not a jazz musician. Listening to her albums, Jones makes more sense viewed as a bucolic country singer who wears her jazz chops lightly; pitched (on some nebulous jazz/country continuum) somewhere jazzwards of Willie Nelson, but a little twangier than Ray Charles.

She rarely sounds as comfortable as she does in The Little Willies, the classic C&W covers band she started in 2003 with four New York pals. One of them is Lee Alexander, her erstwhile partner and bassist; when the couple split in 2007 it was assumed that The Little Willies would not reconvene, especially when Alexander left Manhattan to build and race sportscars in Nevada. But their split was clearly amicable enough to reunite for a second album.

The band’s 2006 debut was recorded in just two days with no overdubs, initially to test out the acoustics of a studio that Jones had built with Alexander. Album number two – laid down live in only three days – follows a similar template, comprising covers of classic country songs by the likes of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson (the last, of course, inspiring the band’s name).

The band’s elder statesman is lead guitarist Jim Campilongo (the Bert Weedon of Brooklyn hipsters), and the lead vocalist on half of the songs is Richard Julian (a singer-songwriter who has recorded a few albums of his own songs, featuring members of Bright Eyes and Wilco), but the band’s USP remains Jones’s beautifully groggy voice. On tracks like Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” or Willie Nelson’s heartbreaking “Permanently Lonely”, it’s those woozy, sighing backing vocals that leap out from the speakers. It’s enough to turn even the jauntiest novelty songs – like “Fowl Owl On The Prowl” (a pastiche song knocked out in a hurry by Quincy Jones from the soundtrack to In The Heat Of The Night) or Burl Ives’ “Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves” (the “Louie Louie” of trucking songs) – into lovely, lazy slumber ballads, their spikiest elements liquefied by Jones’s contributions.

Jones, of course, is not your usual feisty, spit-and-sawdust country diva, and some tales play very differently when she sings lead. When Loretta Lynn sings “Fist City” you can visualise the narrowed eyes, the spinning handbag and the Popeye fists; when Dolly Parton pleads “Jolene”, you can hear the quiet desperation and the implied threat. But, in Jones’s hands, these rugged, rough-hewn songs are sanded down, polished to take on a different, rustic charm.

Only it’s not too polished. For five exceptionally good musicians (all except Richard Julian trained at one of America’s finest jazz and improvisation conservatoires), it’s surprising how sparingly they play. Nashville music – both in its classic honkytonk and its ickier recent guises – has a tendency to pile on the strings, the harmonies, the fiddles and the pedal steel, but The Little Willies keep things gorgeously spartan, with barely an unnecessary note played anywhere. As a result there is no unearned sentiment, and Jones and co manage to eke emotions from Kris Kristofferson’s tear-jerking “For The Good Time” that neither KK nor Elvis Presley managed, and locate a core to Hank Williams’ “Remember Me” that eluded Rickie Lee Jones. It’s that discipline that stops this from being a self-indulgent, back-slapping bar-room session and turns it into something sublime.

John Lewis

You record very fast, which seems astonishing in an age when bands spend months in the studio…

The thing is we’re not having to write material or work out our “sound”. We’re playing old material and we’ve already got our sound figured out from live shows! This time it took a little longer. A track like “Jolene” had no real arrangement, it’s just us trying to zoom into each other and get a vibe. That proved to be a little harder to capture, so we had to try it a few times before we found a take that worked. But we still finished the whole thing in three days.

How do you and Norah divvy up the lead vocals?

It’s just whatever sounds good. Some songs suit her better, some suit me. On “Foul Owl” she starts off on the bottom and ends up on top. Not everyone who becomes successful at music at her level is a great musician. They might be an interesting artist, or have an interesting image. But Norah – you can stick her in any musical context and she can handle it, cos she’s got great ears. Here she shows that she can be a rhythm section player.

The standard criticism is that these are pointless cover versions by bourgeois New Yorkers – what’s your response?

There’s always the question of “are you authentic enough”? We’re not “authentic” in the sense that we don’t have a fiddle or a pedal steel and we don’t sing in a certain accent. But we’re authentic to ourselves, in that we’re not affected. And hopefully we’re introducing people to songs by obscure guys like Ralph Stanley or Red Simpson. Thing is, there’s plenty to chew on with our versions because we’ve got some terrific musicians. “Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves” is a bit of a novelty song, but I think we make it sound kinda… sexy. Ha ha!