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Duane and Muddy dueling slide would be incredible. And perhaps Lowell George - a very underrated slide player - could jam with them as well. I'd add Sonny Boy Williamson to the harp playing contingency.

Mighty Wolf should handle the vocals?

No argument here. Btw, have you ever heard the Wolf's London Sessions? A surprisingly good album (especially considering his age), and he's joined by the likes of C. Watts, B. Wynman, and Eric Clapton. Anyway, right before they go into "Little Red Rooster," The Wolf lectures them all about "finding the groove"...and it's just priceless. Those Englishmen were a bit out of their league.

I liked London Sessions, but to be honest of all the British players who worked on that album I thought, really, that only Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were really sympatico to the Wolf (right around where the Wold lectures them on the "Rooster" groove, old Eric practically has to drag him kicking and screaming to play acoustic slide, which he hadn't played in some time before that date and never really was a whiz with to begin with - but Clapton had it right: the Wolf was no slide virtuoso but he was deadly for just using the technique to set a groove); Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts didn't really seem to find themselves settling in easily or catching the grip of Wolf's subtleties.(Not their fault, really, if you consider that the Stones hadn't been Wolfmen so much as they'd gone for Muddy's later electric work and the Chuck Berry/Bo Diddley sort of rocking blues.) The sleeper sideman of the album: longtime Chess keyboard stalwart Lafayette Leake, one of the more underrated of the legendary Chicago blues sidemen.

Another surprising latter-day Wolf album is Live and Cookin' at Alice's Revisited - he's in surprisingly spry voice in this small club date, and if his band sounds a little too rudimentarily bent in places the exuberance of the performance is worth it.

I liked Sonny Boy Williamson, too, but I actually thought he was a better songwriter than harmonica player (and he was a hell of a harmonica player). The Sonny Boy album to have (though none of them should be away from any serious blues lover): Down and Out Blues, all his own material, and all of it remarkable. Most valuable player: guitarist Robert Jr. Lockwood.

Most valuable Wolf albums: the Chess CD combine of his first two Chess LPs, Moanin' At Midnight and Howlin' Wolf, and the Charly collection of his pre-Chess Sun recordings, Howlin' At The Sun. Not to mention, either of the Wolf entries in the old Chess Real Folk Blues series (More Real Folk Blues is the more cohesive of the pair as an album, but The Real Folk Blues has some of the Wolf's most chilling material, particularly "Tail Dragger," "Nature," and "Natchez Burning")...

Most fun Wolf album: The Super Super Blues Band, a rather crackpot jam album between the Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley.

The one he'd most like to have back, probably: This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It. He Didn't Like His Electric Guitar At First, Either. (One of the ill-advised Chess attempts to semi-psychedelicise some of their blues roster in the late 1960s, though retrospectively does Muddy Waters's Electric Mud prove to have an arch charm about it...)

Btw, have you ever heard the Wolf's London Sessions? A surprisingly good album (especially considering his age), and he's joined by the likes of C. Watts, B. Wynman, and Eric Clapton. Anyway, right before they go into "Little Red Rooster," The Wolf lectures them all about "finding the groove"...and it's just priceless. Those Englishmen were a bit out of their league.

A great record, which I haven't heard in years. Thanks for reminding me.