Mention "Chicago Blues" to even the most casual of Blues and Rock & Roll fans, and they’ll think the Holy Names of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf, the Chicagoland figures that not only drew the blueprints for modern/post-WWII/electric Blues, but were among the midwives of Rock & Roll. But there was a generation of bluesmen and blueswomen that laid the groundwork before them, a generation that migrated from the southern USA north, bringing the music with them and urbanizing it in the bargain. In the 30s, the medium flourished in Chicago and its influence crept into jazz and country music, bringing us, Dear Reader, to this compilation, a listening tour of Chicago Blues in the pre-Muddy years. Many of the songs here, heard in stripped-down/bare-bones style (at least to our "modern" ears), would eventually be interpreted, reworked and re-charged in big band and/or electrified formats in later years: Pine Top’s "Every Day I Have The Blues" would become a hit in the hands of Joe Williams, and a slide guitar-driven standard by Elmore James. Urban(e) guitar great Tampa Red’s "Don’t You Lie To Me" became a standby lesson of/in mild paranoia by Chuck Berry, The Pretty Things and Fats Domino. Washboard Sam may not have written "(My) Bucket’s Got A Hole In It," but it inspired Hank Williams, Sr. to do his classic honky tonk version. Richard M. Jones did write the wistfully-wise "Trouble In Mind," a tune so essentially timeless it’s been covered by artists as disparate as Bob Wills, Merle Haggard and Archie Shepp. Sonny Boy Williamson’s salacious "Good Morning Little School Girl" is now terribly politically incorrect, but it pointed Muddy Waters, The Yardbirds and Johnny Winter to a way up that Macho Mountain. By now, the concept shimmers before you: this volume of When The Sun Goes Down is one of the virtual primers of/in the history of American music. If I had my way, every child in America would be given a copy of this disc on his/her first day of the second grade (and be tested on it).