Muddy Waters

The Delta, turned up loud

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield and grew up on Stovall Plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, driving a tractor, running a Saturday-night juke out of his cabin, and playing bottleneck guitar in the style of the older men he idolised. In 1943 he took the train to Chicago. Within a decade he had turned the lonesome country blues of the Delta into the loud, swaggering, electric music of the South Side, and built the band line-up of guitars, harmonica, piano, bass and drums that rock and roll would adopt.

His records for the Chicago label Chess, from "I Can't Be Satisfied" in 1948 to "Hoochie Coochie Man" in 1954 and "Mannish Boy" in 1955, are the backbone of postwar blues. Many of the best were written for him by Willie Dixon, the label's bassist, producer and house songwriter. His bands were a school in their own right: Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Otis Spann, James Cotton and many more passed through them.

Young British musicians heard those records too. A band in London named itself after his 1950 single "Rollin' Stone", and a San Francisco magazine took the same name in 1967. When the blues boom of the 1960s faded, he came back again, at the Band's Last Waltz in 1976 and on a run of Grammy-winning albums produced by Johnny Winter.

He was the bridge in the story: from Son House and Robert Johnson on one side, to the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin on the other.

Worth knowing

Eleven things about Muddy Waters

1. His grandmother named him.

   Della Grant, who raised him, called him "Muddy" as a small boy because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek. "Waters" came later.

2. Even his birth year is argued over.

   Social Security records give April 4, 1913. From the mid-1950s he told interviewers 1915, and that is the year on his gravestone. He also named Rolling Fork as his birthplace, though the evidence points to Jug's Corner in neighbouring Issaquena County.

3. His first fee was twenty dollars.

   After the 1941 field recordings, Alan Lomax sent him two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty dollars. He later recalled taking the record to a jukebox and playing it over and over.

4. His first hit sold out in a day.

   The story goes that the first pressing of "I Can't Be Satisfied", about 3,000 copies, was gone within a day of its release in 1948, and that a Maxwell Street shop let even Muddy buy only one.

5. He went electric to be heard.

   In the packed, noisy bars of the South Side, an acoustic guitar simply disappeared. Around 1944 he got his first electric guitar, from his uncle Joe Grant by most accounts, and never looked back.

6. "Rollin' Stone" christened the label.

   It was his first single on Chess, issued in 1950 just after the brothers Leonard and Phil Chess renamed their Aristocrat label after themselves.

7. British critics thought he was too loud.

   On his first English tour in October 1958, audiences raised on acoustic folk blues were startled by his amplifier. One paper's headline, as he remembered it, called it screaming guitar and howling piano.

8. He played Newport the morning after a riot.

   Crowds had rioted at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival the night before his set, and the town moved to shut it down. He played anyway on July 3, and the live album that resulted is one of the first great concert records of the blues.

9. His cabin went on tour.

   After it was restored in the 1990s, the Stovall cabin travelled to House of Blues clubs around North America and made an appearance at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta before settling in Clarksdale.

10. His cabin became guitars.

    In 1987 Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top had guitars made from the cabin's old timbers, nicknamed "Muddywood", to raise money for the Delta Blues Museum.

11. He has a crater on Mercury.

    The International Astronomical Union named one after him in 2016.

Life in brief

From Stovall to Westmont

1. 1913Born McKinley Morganfield, April 4 according to official records, in Issaquena County, Mississippi. He grows up with his grandmother on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, learning harmonica first and then guitar.
2. 1941Recorded at home. On August 31, Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress and John W. Work III of Fisk University set up portable equipment in his cabin and record him. Lomax returns for a second session in 1942.
3. 1943Moves to Chicago. He drives a truck and works in a factory by day and plays house parties and bars at night.
4. 1944His first electric guitar. The amplified slide sound that follows becomes the signature of Chicago blues.
5. 1948"I Can't Be Satisfied", a recut of a song he had sung for Lomax in 1941, becomes his first hit on the Chess brothers' Aristocrat label.
6. 1950"Rollin' Stone", recorded in February, is his first release on the newly named Chess label.
7. 1954"Hoochie Coochie Man", written by Willie Dixon and cut on January 7 with Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers and Otis Spann, becomes the biggest hit of his career.
8. 1958First tour of England, with Otis Spann, arranged by the bandleader Chris Barber. The electric sound shocks some listeners and converts others.
9. 1960Newport Jazz Festival, July 3. Chess releases At Newport 1960 that November.
10. 1976The Last Waltz. A featured guest at the Band's farewell concert in San Francisco in November, he tears through "Mannish Boy".
11. 1977Hard Again, produced by Johnny Winter, launches a late-career comeback and wins a Grammy.
12. 1983Dies April 30 in his sleep at home in Westmont, Illinois, of heart failure, aged about seventy.

A porch on Stovall

Hearing himself for the first time

In the summer of 1941, Alan Lomax and the Fisk University composer and folklorist John W. Work III came to Coahoma County on a joint expedition for the Library of Congress and Fisk. They had come partly in search of Robert Johnson, who had died three years earlier. What they found on Stovall was a 28-year-old tractor driver who ran a juke out of his own cabin and played slide guitar with a heavy, rolling authority.

The recordings are remarkable for what they capture: the young Muddy talks as well as plays, and speaks of his admiration for Son House, the preacher-bluesman whose bottleneck style he had studied. He said in later years that it was House who made him want to play, and that he picked up the slide from him. His "Country Blues" from that first session is built on the same frame as Johnson's "Walking Blues", which itself traces back to House.

Then Lomax played the recordings back to him. Muddy had never heard his own voice from the outside. He later described the moment as a revelation: he sounded, he said, just like anybody's records. The thought that he could be a recording artist, not just a plantation juke-joint player, took hold. Two years later he was in Chicago.

One song, three names

How "Rollin' Stone" named a generation

"Rollin' Stone", recorded in February 1950, is just Muddy and his guitar, a slow, hypnotic one-chord blues about restlessness. It grew out of "Catfish Blues", an old Delta theme that Robert Petway put on record in 1941, though one biographer notes that musicians had sung "Catfish Blues" in the Delta for years without ever making it sound like this.

In London in 1962, Brian Jones was on the phone to the weekly Jazz News, placing a listing for his new band, when he was asked for its name. The story goes that a Muddy Waters LP lay on the floor nearby, with "Rollin' Stone" among its tracks. The Rolling Stones kept it. Rolling Stone magazine, launched in San Francisco in 1967, carries the same name.

The song also travelled. Jimi Hendrix's 1967 "Catfish Blues" drew on "Rollin' Stone" and Muddy's "Still a Fool", and Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" grew out of that. In 2019 the Blues Foundation inducted Muddy's original into its Hall of Fame.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1948 I Can't Be Satisfied Electric slide and string bass, nothing else. The 1941 field song "I Be's Troubled", reborn for a Chicago jukebox.
• 1950 Rollin' Stone A one-chord Delta trance on electric guitar, descended from "Catfish Blues". It named a band and a magazine, and fed straight into Hendrix's "Catfish Blues" and "Voodoo Chile". Jimi Hendrix 1967
• 1954 Hoochie Coochie Man Willie Dixon's boast song, built on a stop-time riff that became common property of blues, R&B and rock. The Allman Brothers Band recorded it on Idlewild South (1970), with Berry Oakley singing. Allman Brothers 1970
• 1955 Mannish Boy An answer to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", which had itself answered "Hoochie Coochie Man". Coming from a Black man fresh from the Jim Crow South, its insistence on full-grown manhood was pointed. He revived it on Hard Again and at The Last Waltz, and the Rolling Stones recorded it live in Toronto for Love You Live (1977). Rolling Stones 1977
• 1962 You Need Love A Dixon song sung over an Earl Hooker slide track. The Small Faces recorded "You Need Loving" in 1966, and Dixon now shares the writing credit on Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love". Small Faces 1966Led Zeppelin 1969

Why he matters

The father of Chicago blues

Muddy Waters did not invent the electric guitar or the blues band, but he fused them into the form that became the standard. His 1958 visit to England pushed Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to plug in, and the London rhythm-and-blues scene that grew around them produced the Rolling Stones, who recorded at Chess in 1964. Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield played on his 1969 album Fathers and Sons.

He outlasted the fashions, too. Johnny Winter's four productions for him between 1977 and 1981 brought him three Grammys in a row, and he won six over his career. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992.

In Clarksdale, the cabin where Lomax first recorded him stands inside the Delta Blues Museum. Visitors can sit in it and watch a film about his life, a few miles from the cotton fields he left behind. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the old Stovall site tells the rest.