The purpose of this release was to present an overview of the past seventy years of the blues, culling the historical MCA-owned catalogs of Chess, Decca, Duke-Peacock, and others. We were striving to find a unique presentation/configuration to capture both the look and the feeling of the music and past eras. The wood from Muddy Waters’s Stovall Plantation cabin was used as the basis for the outer surface of the package. New photographs were taken at locations throughout the South where the blues were born. These new images elaborated on period photographs of the artists, presenting complementary visual imagery for the set’s extensive liner notes.