SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LAURA MVULA
October 10-16
DIZZY GILLESPIE
October 17-23
LESTER YOUNG
October 24-30
TIA FULLER
October 31-November 6
ROSCOE MITCHELL
November 7-13
MAX ROACH
November 14-20
DINAH WASHINGTON
November 21-27
BUDDY GUY
November 28-December 4
JOE HENDERSON
December 5-11
HENRY THREADGILL
December 12-18
MUDDY WATERS
December 19-25
B.B. KING
December 26-January 1
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/muddy-waters-mn0000608701/biography
MUDDY WATERS
Artist Biography by Mark Deming
Muddy Waters was the single most important artist to emerge in post-war American blues. A peerless singer, a gifted songwriter, an able guitarist, and leader of one of the strongest bands in the genre (which became a proving ground for a number of musicians who would become legends in their own right), Waters absorbed the influences of rural blues from the Deep South and moved them uptown, injecting his music with a fierce, electric energy and helping pioneer the Chicago Blues style that would come to dominate the music through the 1950s, ‘60s, and '70s. The depth of Waters' influence on rock as well as blues is almost incalculable, and remarkably, he made some of his strongest and most vital recordings in the last five years of his life.
Waters was born McKinley Morganfield, and historians argue about some details of his early life; while he often told reporters he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi on April 4, 1915, researchers have uncovered census records and personal documents that would pin the year of his birth at 1913 or 1914, and others have cited the place of his birth as Jug's Corner, a town in Mississippi's Issaquena County. What is certain is that Morganfield's mother died when he just three years old, and from then on he was raised on the Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi by his grandmother, Della Grant. Grant is said to have given young Morganfield the nickname "Muddy" because he liked to play in the mud as a boy, and the name stuck, with "Water" and "Waters" being tacked on a few years later. The rural South was a hotbed for the blues in the '20s and ‘30s, and young Muddy became entranced with the music when he discovered a neighbor had a phonograph and records by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red.
As Muddy became more deeply immersed in the blues, he took up the harmonica; he was performing locally at parties and fish fries by the age of 13, sometimes with guitarist Scott Bohanner, who lived and worked in Stovall. In his early teens, Muddy was introduced to the sound of contemporary Delta blues artists, such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton; their music inspired Waters to switch instruments, and he bought a guitar when he was 17, learning to play in the bottleneck style. Within a few years, he was performing on his own and with a local string band, the Son Simms Four; he also opened a juke joint on the Stovall grounds, where fellow sharecroppers could listen to music, enjoy a drink or a snack, and gamble. Waters became a fixture in Mississippi, performing with the likes of Big Joe Williams and Robert Nighthawk, and in the late summer of 1941, musical archivists Alan Lomax and John Work III arrived in Mississippi with a portable recording rig, eager to document local blues talent for the Library of Congress (it's said they were hoping to locate Robert Johnson, only to learn he had died three years earlier). Lomax and Work were strongly impressed with Waters, and recorded several sides of him performing in his juke joint; two of the songs were released as a 78, and when Waters received two copies of the single and $20 from Lomax, it encouraged him to seriously consider a professional career. In July 1943, Lomax returned to record more material with Waters; these early sessions with Lomax were collected on the album Down On Stovall's Plantation in 1966, and a 1994 reissue of the material, The Complete Plantation Recordings, won a Grammy award.
In 1943, Waters decided to pull up stakes and relocate to Chicago, Illinois in hopes of making a living off his music. (He moved to St. Louis for a spell in 1940, but didn't care for it.) Waters drove a truck and worked at a paper plant by day, and at night struggled to make a name for himself, playing house parties and any bar that would have him. Big Bill Broonzy reached out to Waters and helped him land better gigs; Muddy had recently switched to electric guitar to be better heard in noisy clubs, which added a new power to his cutting slide work. By 1946, Waters had come to the attention of Okeh Records, who took him into the studio to record but chose not to release the results. A session that same year for 20th Century Records resulted in just one tune being issued as the B-side of a James "Sweet Lucy" Carter release, but Waters fared better with Aristocrat Records, a Chicago-based label founded by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. The Chess Brothers began recording Waters in 1947, and while a few early sides with Sunnyland Slim failed to make an impression, his second single for Aristocrat as a headliner, "I Can't Be Satisfied" b/w "(I Feel Like) Goin' Home," became a significant hit and launched Waters as a star on the Chicago blues scene.
Initially, the Chess Brothers recorded Waters with trusted local musicians (including Earnest "Big" Crawford and Alex Atkins), but for his live work, Waters had recruited a band which included Little Walter on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, and Baby Face Leroy Foster on drums (later replaced by Elgin Evans), and in person, Waters and his group earned their reputation as the most powerful blues band in town, with Waters' passionate vocals and guitar matched by the force of his combo. By the early '50s, the Chess Brothers (who had changed the name of their label from Aristocrat to Chess Records in 1950) began using Waters' stage band in the studio, and Little Walter in particular became a favorite with blues fans and a superb foil for Waters. Otis Spann joined Waters' group on piano in 1953, and he would become the anchor for the band well into the '60s, after Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers had left to pursue solo careers. In the '50s, Waters released some of the most powerful and influential music in the history of electric blues, scoring hits with numbers like "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" "I'm Ready," "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy," "Trouble No More," "Got My Mojo Working," and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" which made him a frequent presence on the R&B charts.
By the end of the '50s, while Waters was still making fine music, his career was going into a slump. The rise of rock & roll had taken the spotlight away from more traditional blues acts in favor of younger and rowdier acts (ironically, Waters had headlined some of Alan Freed's early "Moondog" package shows), and Waters' first tour of England in 1958 was poorly received by many U.K. blues fans, who were expecting an acoustic set and were startled by the ferocity of Waters' electric guitar. Waters began playing more acoustic music informed by his Mississippi Delta heritage in the years that followed, even issuing an album titled Muddy Waters: Folk Singer in 1964. However, the jolly irony was that British blues fans would soon rekindle interest in Waters and electric Chicago blues; as the rise of the British Invasion made the world aware of the U.K. rock scene, the nascent British blues scene soon followed, and a number of Waters' U.K. acolytes became international stars, such as Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Alexis Korner, and a modestly successful London act who named themselves after Muddy's 1950 hit "Rollin' Stone." While Waters was still leading a fine band that delivered live (and included the likes of Pinetop Perkins on piano and James Cotton on harmonica), Chess Records was moving more toward the rock, soul, and R&B marketplace, and seemed eager to market him to white rock fans, a notion that reached its nadir in 1968 with Electric Mud, in which Waters was paired up with a psychedelic rock band (featuring guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch) for rambling and aimless jams on Waters' blues classics. 1969's Fathers and Sons was a more inspired variation on this theme, with Waters playing alongside reverential white blues rockers such as Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield; 1971's The London Muddy Waters Sessions was less impressive, featuring fine guitar work from Rory Gallagher but uninspired contributions from Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Georgie Fame.
Curiously, while Chess Records helped Waters make some of the finest blues records of the '50s and ‘60s, it was the label's demise that led to his creative rebirth. In 1969, the Chess Brothers sold the label to General Recorded Tape, and the label went through a long, slow commercial decline, finally folding in 1975. (Waters would become one of several Chess artists who sued the label for unpaid royalties in its later years.) Johnny Winter, a longtime Waters fan, heard the blues legend was without a record deal, and was instrumental in getting Waters signed to Blue Sky Records, a CBS-distributed label that had become his recording home. Winter produced the sessions for Waters' first Blue Sky release, and sat in with a band comprised of members of Waters' road band (including Bob Margolin and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith) along with James Cotton on harp and Pinetop Perkins on piano. 1977's Hard Again was a triumph, sounding as raw and forceful as Waters' classic Chess sides, with a couple extra decades of experience informing his performances, and it was rightly hailed as one of the finest albums Waters ever made while sparking new interest in his music. (It also earned him a Grammy award for Best Traditional or Ethnic Folk Recording.) Waters also dazzled music fans when he appeared at the Band's celebrated farewell concert on Thanksgiving 1976 at the invitation of Levon Helm, who had helped produce one of his last Chess releases, The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. Muddy delivered a stunning performance of "Mannish Boy" that became one of the highlights of Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. Between Hard Again and The Last Waltz, Waters enjoyed a major career boost, and he found himself touring again for large and enthusiastic crowds, sharing stages with the likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, and cutting two more well-received albums with Winter as producer, 1978's I'm Ready and 1981's King Bee, as well as a solid 1979 concert set, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. Waters' health began to fail him in 1982, and his final live appearance came in the fall of that year, when he sang a few songs at an Eric Clapton show in Florida. Waters died quietly of heart failure at his home in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983. Since then, both Chicago and Westmont have named streets in Muddy's honor, he's appeared on a postage stamp, a marker commemorates the site of his childhood home in Clarksdale, and he appeared as a character in the 2008 film Cadillac Records, played by Jeffrey Wright.
https://rockhall.com/inductees/muddy-waters/bio/
MUDDY WATERS BIOGRAPHY
Muddy Waters
(vocals, guitar; born April 4, 1913, died April 30, 1983)
Muddy Waters transformed the soul of the rural South into the sound of the city, electrifying the blues at a pivotal point in the early postwar period. His recorded legacy, particularly the wealth of sides he cut in the Fifties, is one of the great musical treasures of this century. Aside from Robert Johnson, no single figure is more important in the history and development of the blues than Waters. The real question as regards his lasting impact on popular music isn’t “Who did he influence?” but - as Goldmine magazine asked in 2001 - “Who didn’t he influence?”
Above all others, it was Waters who linked the country blues of his native Mississippi Delta with the urban blues that were born in Chicago. Waters bought his first electric guitar in 1944 and revolutionized the blues with the recordings he began making in 1948. His amplified combo consisted of himself on slide guitar and vocals, a second guitarist, bass, drums, piano and harmonica. The Muddy Waters Blues Band bore all the earmarks - in terms of size, volume and attitude - of the great rock and roll bands that would follow in its wake.
He was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915. At the age of three he was sent to live with his grandmother, on the Stovall Plantation north of Clarksdale, after his mother died. There he acquired the nickname “Muddy” for his penchant for playing in nearby creeks and puddles. Waters began playing harmonica at the age of seven and took up guitar at seventeen. He picked cotton on the plantation for fifty cents a day and played music as part of a trio at fish fries and house parties on weekends. Folklorist Alan Lomax, while making field recordings for the Library of Congress, tracked down and recorded Waters in 1941 on the Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale, Miss. Several of these performances were released on Library of Congress anthologies and stand as his first recordings. In May 1943, Waters made the move from the rural plantation to the big city, heading north to Chicago by train.
Waters’ approach to the blues underwent a dramatic metamorphosis after moving to Chicago, where he befriended and played with such estimable figures as Big Bill Broonzy and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. Waters switched from acoustic to electric guitar in order to be heard over the din of patrons at the clubs he played on Chicago’s South Side. After a few false starts, Waters’ recording career began in earnest soon after pianist Sunnyland Slim introduced him to Leonard Chess, co-owner of the Aristocrat label (later Chess Records). Working at the famed Chess Studios on South Michigan Avenue, Waters cut many of the greatest recordings in the blues canon. He developed a fruitful team approach to record-making with producer Leonard Chess, bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon, and various musical associates.
In a relaxed, informal studio setting Waters and band laid down a string of citified, plugged-in electric blues that bore the rustic stamp of their Mississippi Delta underpinnings. A flood of blues-standards-to-be from Waters commenced with the 1948 release of “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” a raw, uncut Delta blues. Other classic sides included songs written for Waters by Willie Dixon ("I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready") and by Waters himself (“Mannish Boy,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’").
Waters was a fierce singer and slashing slide guitarist whose uncut blues bore the stamp of his mentors, Robert Johnson and Son House. For his own part, Waters served to mentor or at least launch many prominent blues musicians, many of whom went on to careers as bandleaders in their own right. The list of notable musicians who passed through Waters’ band includes harmonica players “Little Walter” Jacobs, “Big Walter” Horton, Junior Wells and James Cotton; guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Pat Hare, Luther Tucker and Earl Hooker; pianists Memphis Slim, Otis Spann and Pinetop Perkins; and drummers Elgin Evans, Fred Below and Francis Clay.
Waters’ greatest studio recordings were released as singles during the Fifties, and his first album - a collection of singles entitled The Best of Muddy Waters - didn’t appear until 1958. The Sixties found Waters performing to an ever-widening and appreciative audience as the younger generation acquired an insight into rock and roll’s essential grounding in the blues. In 1960, Waters performed a fiery, unforgettable set at the Newport Folk Festival, released that same year as Muddy Waters at Newport.
Waters also capitalized on the folk-music craze of the late Fifties and early Sixties with a series of albums that found him assaying acoustic blues on such albums as Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill (a tribute to rural bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, released in 1960), Muddy Waters, Folk Singer (1964) and The Real Folk Blues (1966). Less successful were attempts to contemporize his sound with such ill-advised efforts as “Muddy Waters Twist” (a 1962 single) and Electric Mud (an album of psychedelic blues from 1968). More satisfying by far were a couple of albums - Fathers and Sons (1969) and The London Muddy Waters Sessions (1972) - that found Waters accompanied by such vanguard rock musicians as Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton. His thirty-year tenure with Chess Records ended in 1975 with the release of The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. From here, he moved to the Blue Sky label (a Columbia subsidiary).
Waters’ audience grew exponentially following his electrifying performance in The Last Waltz, a film documentary (produced by Martin Scorsese) of The Band’s farewell concert. Staged at San Francisco’s Winterland ballroom, the Thanksgiving 1976 event was a star-studded affair. Water’s scalding rendition of “Mannish Boy” - on which he was accompanied by The Band and Paul Butterfield on harmonica - was an unforgettable highlight. Subsequent to that, he kept the momentum going with a series of uncompromising albums for Blue Sky that were produced by longtime fan Johnny Winter. These included Hard Again (1977), I’m Ready (1978), Muddy Mississippi Waters Live (1979) and King Bee (1981). All were critical and popular successes.
In addition to his musical legacy, Waters helped cultivate a great respect for the blues as one of its most commanding and articulate figureheads. Drummer Levon Helm of The Band, who worked with him on The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album and at The Last Waltz, had this to say about him in a Goldmine magazine interview: “Muddy taught us to take things in context, to be respectful, and to be serious about our music, as he was. He showed us music is a sacred thing.”
Waters, who remained active till the end, died of a heart attack in 1983. He was 68 years old. In the years since his death, the one-room cedar shack in which he lived on the Stovall Plantation has been preserved as a memorial to Waters’ humble origins
See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/muddy-waters/bio/#sthash.Wa95U08w.dpuf
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/muddy-waters-the-delta-son-never-sets-19781005
RS 275
The original 'Rollin' Stone' on a life with the blues
by Robert Palmer
October 5, 1978
Rolling Stone
Muddy Waters, the master bluesman, is now sixty-three. He lives out in the suburbs, almost an hour's drive from downtown Chicago and the decaying South Side where he lived for the past three decades. His white, two-story frame house sits on a quiet corner, shaded by pine trees, with nothing to let a visitor know who owns it except the small, circumspect initials MW on the front door. Inside, it's comfortable: deep carpeting in the living room, modern furniture, a big, all-electric kitchen with grandchildren and neighbors' kids constantly running through it. A few dogs, brought from the South Side where they were protectors, sleep lazily by the toolshed. It's not a pop star's house by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the kind of house very, very few of Chicago's approximately 1.5 million black people will ever own.
Muddy, who is beginning to show his age but remains a wholly commanding presence with his high cheekbones, half-lidded Oriental eyes and undiminished aura of mannish self-confidence – ''I'm a full-growed man,'' he sings, ''a natural-born lover man,'' and you believe him – takes a visitor through the house matter-of-factly, with just a hint of pride. In the small anteroom to the den he points out framed portraits of former sidemen Little Walter and James Cotton, and in the little garden patches around the house and by the concrete driveway, he indicates his cabbage, his greens, his red and green chili peppers and his okra. He doesn't brag about his successes, one suspects, because he knows he deserves them. But he certainly couldn't have imagined it all when he first got off the Illinois Central train in Chicago, back in May 1943. Except for a brief and not very satisfactory sortie to St. Louis and a few quick visits to Memphis, he had not traveled beyond the countryside and small towns of the Mississippi Delta, and he was twenty-eight years old.
The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Muddy Waters
Sunnyland Slim, the pianist and singer who got Muddy his first record date with Leonard and Phil Chess in 1947, is working in the heart of the South Side, 61st and Calumet under the El stop. To find Slim, you walk into Morgen's Liquors' front door, down the bar in the middle, into the boisterous music room in the rear. Slim is sitting at a battered, red Wurlitzer electric piano, rapping out tone clusters in the treble and walking the basses with all the authority of his sixty-odd years playing blues, while Louis Myers, the leader of the band and once the guitarist in Little Walter's celebrated Aces, sings blues standards.
''I don't like to play in these kind of places no more,'' Slim says during a break, sipping from a glass of booze and pushing his weathered face up close so he can be heard over the buzz of conversation and the B.B. King record on the jukebox. ''I'll be seventy-six soon. I've just been out to California, Europe. . . . I'm just down here helping Louis out.'' He knows the subject of the conversation is supposed to be Muddy, and like Muddy, he is a proud man. ''You want to know what made Muddy popular? Leonard Chess pushed him. At that time, see, they was still playing the blues on the radio, not like it is now. Those first records he had out, a whole bunch of us had been doin' that rockin' style for years. I brought him in to play guitar for me, on that session when I made 'Johnson Machine Gun.' The man asked me, 'Say, what about your boy there, can he sing?' Talking about Muddy, you know. And I said, 'Like a bird.'''
Later, over on the North Side in a white singles bar with pinball machines and pizza, Jimmy Rogers, second guitarist on Muddy's classic blues records of the early Fifties, is setting up for a gig with the brilliant but erratic harmonica virtuoso Walter Horton. ''Muddy,'' says Rogers, ''Muddy has a whole lot of soul. Maybe it's not the words that he says so much as the way that he says 'em. He has a voice that I haven't heard anybody could imitate. They can copy his slide style of guitar, but when the voice comes in, that's different. I know his voice anywhere I hear it.''
Willie Dixon, the blues bassist, songwriter and producer, sums up peer-group opinion in a few characteristically well-chosen words: ''Everybody liked him 'cause he could really howl those blues.''
What was it about Muddy that made him so widely respected and admired, that made his blues, in his own words, ''deeper'' than the blues of his competitors? Leonard Chess did push Muddy, but he was pushing a man with extraordinary musical gifts and an extraordinary feeling for the blues.
Conventional wisdom has it that blues melodies consist of five, six or seven pitches or notes, with the third and seventh and sometimes the fifth notes of the scale being treated a little funny, flattened but not quite as flat as the black keys on the piano; these are the ''blue notes.'' But if you listen carefully to Muddy, or to any other really deep blues singer, you'll find that he systematically sings the third and, especially, the fifth notes of the scale infintesimally flatter or sharper, depending on where in the line the pitches fall and on the feelings he's trying to convey.
Muddy is the living master of these subtleties. He gets them on guitar too – listen to his slide solo on ''Honey Bee,'' on the Chess/All-Platinum Muddy Waters reissue, for example – and he's aware of getting them. ''Yeah, yeah,'' he says when he is accused of playing microtones, or notes that would fall between the cracks on the piano. ''When I plays on the stage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.''
The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Muddy Waters
Subtle as these inflections are, young guitarists can at least hope to learn to hear and execute them properly. But as Slim and Rogers and Dixon all noted, Muddy's great strength is his singing, something nobody has been able to duplicate. In addition to his mastery of pitch shadings, he also commands some remarkable textural effects. You can see him in Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz, screwing up the side of his face, shaking his jowls, constantly readjusting the shape of his mouth in order to get specific vocal sounds. And his timing is a kind of standing joke among musicians who have played with him. ''I'm a delay singer,'' he says. ''I don't sing on the beat. I sing behind it. And people have to delay to play with me. They got to hang around, wait, see what's going to happen next.''
Muddy's sovereign control of these techniques – how many other bluesmen have had comparable mastery of them? Son House? Robert Johnson? Charley Patton? – goes a long way toward explaining the absolute, unquestioned authority he radiates. It's evident that he didn't learn them in school. They could be taught, if the teacher knew them as well as Muddy does and the student were willing to put in as much time and hard work as it takes to become, say, a first-class opera diva. But in the Delta the learning process, while no less rigorous, was more diffuse.
It's important to remember that Muddy was already an established bluesman when Robert Johnson made the first of his own keening, driven recordings in 1936. In fact, Muddy was already known in Chicago. Willie Dixon, who settled in the Windy City that same year, remembers that when talk got around to serious blues singing, people from the Delta invaribly brought up Muddy. Although he heard phonograph records, the way he learned his music and the environment in which he learned it – two sides of the same coin – were almost entirely traditional.
Since Muddy was a fully formed musician by the time he arrived in Chicago, it seemed important to talk about his formative years as thoroughly as possible, and this is what we did, sitting at his kitchen table sipping Piper Heidsieck champagne and Coca Cola. He was a little reticent at first, but soon he began recalling Mississippi scenes in more detail and really enjoying himself. We rambled through that fated countryside for hours. At times the dogs in back of the house would begin to bay like hounds; Bo, his man who grew up with him on the plantation, would say something to the children in his almost impenetrable Delta accent; a suggestion of a warm breeze would waft in the screen door, and we would be there.
Muddy was born McKinly Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, April 4th, 1913. He doesn't remember anything about his parents cabin because when he was a baby his mother carried him to the country near Clarksdale, where her mother raised him. He got the nickname Muddy right away because he liked to crawl around in the mud and tried to eat it.
His grandmother lived three or four miles outside Clarksdale, on a huge plantation owned by the Stovall family. Not even white folks in the Delta had electricity in those days, and water came from a pump. Every day the able-bodied members of that household went out to work in the cotton fields. Nominally, they were farming the Stovalls' land and sharing in the proceeds from the crop. But since the Stovalls kept the books and charged the black families for seed and provisions from the plantation store, the sharecroppers usually ended up in debt after the year's tally. Men could also work for salaries, picking or chopping cotton or, later, driving a tractor. Families could raise their own vegetables and livestock to eat, milk or sell. But it was still a rough, precarious existence, one that depended on the notorious vagaries of Delta weather as much as it did on any human agency.
As far as Muddy can remember, he was born musical. ''When I was around three years old I was beatin on bucket tops and tin cans. Anything with a sound I would try to play it; I'd even take my stick and beat on the ground tryin' to get a new sound. [He still likes mud and earth. Even today, nothing seems to relax Muddy as much as getting down on his hands and knees and digging in his garden.] And whatever I beat on, I'd be hummin' my little baby song along with it. My first instrument, which a lady give me and some kids soon broke for me, was an old squeeze-box, an accordion. The next thing I had in my hand was a jew's-harp. When I was about seven I started playing the harmonica, and when I got about thirteen I was playing it very good. I should never have give it up! But when I was seventeen I switched to the guitar and put the harp down. I sold our last horse for the first guitar I had. Made fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother $7.50, I kept $7.50 and paid about $2.50 for my guitar.''
Even before he bought the guitar, Muddy was playing at country suppers and fish fries for pocket change, blowing his harp along with a guitarist friend named Scott. But once he had the guitar in his hands, Muddy learned fast. The basic Delta bluse repertoire – songs like ''Catfish Blues,'' which became the basis for Muddy's ''Rollin' Stone,'' or ''Dark Road Blues'' or ''Walkin' Blues'' – was readily accessible, since anybody who fooled with a guitar was able more or less to get through them. For fine points, there were masters to emulate: ''Charley Patton? He had so much showmanship in his thing, all this wild clownin' with the guitar, and he could holler! Ooh, what a voice. But Son House was the top man in my book. I always did like the bottleneck style, and he was the man doin' that then. And he had the kind of singing I liked, that preaching kind of singing.''
Son House occasionally renounced the blues and preached in churches, though never for very long until he left Mississippi. I wondered if Muddy went to church. ''Yes sir,'' he said, ''can't you hear it in my voice? Plenty of people would stay up all night and listen to the blues and go home, get ready and go to church. Back then, there was three things I wanted to be: a heck of a preacher, a heck of a ballplayer or a heck of a musician.''
When Muddy was twelve or thirteen, a neighbor bought a record player. and he began spending hours at her house, listening to Memphis Minnies ''Bumble Bee'' (the basis of his ''Honey Bee''), Lonnie Johnson's ''Careless Love'' and Pattons ''Pony Blues.'' When he took up the guitar, the first two songs he learned were from records: ''How Long Blues'' by Leroy Carr, a blues pianist who lived in Indianapolis, and ''Sittin' on Top of the World'' by a black string band, the Mississippi Sheiks. He played both of them with a slide, translating relatively urbane pieces into a stark, insistent Delta style.
Muddy never looked back once he established himself locally as a musician. ''I didn't like farming,'' he said. ''I always expected my guitar could beat driving tractors, plowing mules, chopping cotton, drawing water. Sometimes they'd want us to work Saturday, but – and Bo here can witness this – they'd look for me and I'd be gone, playing my guitar in the little town or in some juke joint. Was I a rambler? I rambled all the time. That's why I added that verse about the rollin' stone to 'Catfish Blues' and named it 'Rollin' Stone.' I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.'' Muddy recorded his classic rambler's boast in 1950. It furnished the name for the rock & roll band and for this magazine, ''But I didn't ramble that far,'' Muddy added. ''I was in love with my grandmother, she was getting old, and I didn't want to push out and leave her.''
Muddy married when he was eighteen. His bride was around seventeen, and they both had to lie about their ages at the Clarksdale courthouse. Since Muddy now had more responsibilities and less reason to ramble, his next move was to go into the Saturday night business for himself. ''First I'd have my own Saturday night dances. I got hip and started making and selling my own whiskey, playing for myself. I had my little crap table going in the back. I'd put coal oil in bottles, take a rope and hang 'em up there on the porch to let people know my dance was going on, and I had a lot of them lights for people to gamble by. Its pretty hard to see the dice sometimes in that lamplight. They had some fast boys with the dice down there; you had to have good eyes.''
You had to have more than that. Most gamblers carried a pistol, as Muddy did off and on for years, and most had good-luck charms made by local hoodoo doctors. Sometimes a really successful gambler would disappear for a few days or weeks and reappear with a charm he claimed to have purchased in the South's most powerful hoodoo center, New Orleans. ''We all believed in mojo hands, which is a luck charm. If you were gambling, the mojo would take care of that, you'd win, and the woman you want, you could work that on her and win. I won some money one night, so I went off and bought me a three-dollar mojo.
''The mojo doctor's hair was real white, he was a long, tall guy. He looked weird, and he had weird little tingalings hanging in his office. He got a little piece of paper, had writing on it, and he rolled it up right, sealed it in an envelope, put some perfume on the envelope. And you know what? It was five years before I won another quarter.'' Bo, who was frying some shrimp, exploded with laughter. ''Then I got mad, I got broke once in a crap game and decided I'm gonna open it and see what's in it, and it was just some little writing: 'You win, you win, you win, I win, you win, I win.' I had it read to me. It's just a con game on people's heads, you know, getting the fools. If such a thing as a mojo had've been good, you'd have had to go down to Louisiana to find one. They could have had a few things down in Louisiana doing something. But up in the Delta, nothing, I don't think.''
Muddy expanded from occasional Saturday night dances to a regular operation. By the early Forties he was running his own juke house, with a policy wheel for serious gambling, one of the new jukeboxes, his moonshine whiskey and music. Sometimes he played there alone, blowing a kazoo mounted in a neck rack and bearing down heavily on his guitar to keep people dancing. ''They'd be doing the snake hips, working their butts, you know, and all those old dances, and hollering, 'Ooh shit, play it,' and I'm just blowing on my little jazz horn and hitting on my guitar. You know, the country sounds different than in the city, the sound out there be empty. You could hear that guitar before you got to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollering.''
This was what was going on in the summer of 1941, when the pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax showed up at Stovall's plantation with his bulky portable recording rig. He was looking for folk music for the Library of Congress and he inquired after Robert Johnson, but Robert had been murdered a few years before and everyone recommended Muddy. ''He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house,'' Muddy remembered, ''and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said. 'I can do it, I can do it.'''
Lomax returned to Stovall in July 1942 and recorded Muddy again, as a soloist and with the blues fiddler Son Sims and his string band. These and the 1941 recordings are available on the album Down on Storvall's Plantation, on the Testament label, and they are phenomenal. Muddy played his steel-bodied guitar with razor-sharp accuracy, setting up hypnotic repeating patterns in the bass and filling in sharp slide figures in the treble, singing with gripping immediacy. He would rework a number of the songs he recorded for Lomax – most of which were based more or less directly on traditional pieces in the first place – into the staples of his repertoire after he got to Chicago. And once Muddy recorded for Lomax he was Chicago-bound, whether he knew it or not.
He had already been infected by a certain restlessness. ''I left my first little wife, who's dead now, God bless her, for another woman,'' he recalled, looking a little wistful for the first and only time in the conversation. ''I don't know what the hell was wrong with me; I was kind of a wild cat, man. I'd stay with her awhile and then come back and go away, and then I took this other woman from the little town next to my little town and we went and caught a train for St. Louis. But I wasn't used to the big city and didn't like it, so we went back, and I told my wife, 'Hey, I done get married, you can move out.' What a mess will country peoples do! Later I brought this woman to Chicago with me and we couldn't get along no kind of way, I had to get rid of her. Well, I was crazy, that's all.''
Muddy was bound to tangle with white authority sooner or later, and in May 1943 he had words with the overseer who ran the plantation while Mr. Stovall was away in the army. ''I asked him would he raise me to twenty-five cents an hour for driving the tractor, which is what the other people were getting, and he had a fit. When he got through stomping around, my mind just said, 'Go to Chicago.' I went to my grandmother and she said, 'Well, if you think you're going to have some problem' – you know how it was down there – 'you better go.' That was on Monday. I worked till that Thursday at five o'clock, and on Friday I came in sick and went on to Clarksdale to catch that four-o'clock train.''
What Muddy saw when he stepped off the train, still a little woozy from the all-day, all-night journey, was completely alien to the world he had known. ''I wish you could've seen me. I got off the train and it looked like this was the fastest place in the world: cabs dropping fares, horns blowing, the peoples walking so fast.''
Muddy slept on a couch in the living room of his sister's and her husbands apartment his first week in Chicago. But it was wartime. Industry was booming and manpower was scarce. Muddy got a draft call almost as soon as he arrived in the city – he'd been protected on the plantation because his job was considered vital to agriculture – but once the army learned he had quit school after the second or third grade and couldn't really read or write, they turned him down, to his great delight. He worked several factory and truck-driving jobs, took a four-room apartment, and eventually landed a job delivering Venetian blinds. He made his run in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and played at rent parties and in small taverns at night.
His music began to change. He was concentrating more on his singing and less on his guitar, and working with some other musicians from the Delta, among them pianist Eddie Boyd and guitarists Blue Smitty and Baby Face Leroy. In 1945 his grandmother died, and it was in the spring of 1946, after he returned from burying her, that he met Jimmy Rogers, then mostly a harmonica player. They formed a little group with Rogers on harp and Muddy and Smitty on guitars, and began playing around at house parties and small taverns.
''Muddy was a little older,'' Jimmy says, ''and he was the most like ol' Robert Johnson's style with the slide guitar. I understood the slide style quite well – I learned guitar in the Delta – so I could back him up good. Pretty soon Smitty and I just put Muddy as the leader, because he would do most of the rough blues singing.''
The black neighborhoods were lawless and overcrowded. New arrivals, most of them from Mississippi and neighboring states, were pushing in every day and the whites were fighting to keep them contained on the rapidly deteriorating South and West Sides. The blues scene was transitional. Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and some other Southern bluesmen who had been popular before the war were still the kingpins, largely because of their recording connections. But Muddy and his friends were part of a new wave of musicians who played a harder, more down-home brand of blues, the kind that was being heard in Southern juke joints. In order to cut through crowd noise and compete with the volume of the jukeboxes, these younger bluesmen bought amplifiers, which became mandatory once they began to contend with the decibel level in rowdy city taverns. As the migrants continued to pour in, Muddy's electrified country blues became more and more popular.
Muddy recorded three songs for Columbia in 1946, but they were never issued. In 1947 he was in the studio again, playing guitar for Sunnyland Slim and cutting two numbers of his own for the Aristocrat label, with Slim featured on the piano – ''Gypsy Woman,'' his first recorded blues on a hoodoo theme, and ''Little Anna Mae.'' Leonard and Phil Chess, two Polish immigrants who had started Aristocrat that year to record music aimed at the patrons of their South Side nightclub, didn't know what to make of Muddy's raw sound and shelved the records. But early in 1948 Leonard Chess, who handled the producing end of the business, called Muddy back to cut two more sides, which turned out to be reworkings of two of the traditional blues he'd recorded for Lomax. They were ''I Can't Be Satisfied'' and ''I Feel like Going Home.'' Singing at peak power and playing magnificent electric slide guitar, backed only by Big Crawford's string bass, Muddy was just too impressive to ignore.
Leonard Chess knew very little about down-home blues, having recorded mostly tenor-saxophone instrumental by the jazz-oriented performers who worked in his club, but he put the record out. To his surprise, it became Aristocrat's biggest seller. From that point on the Chess brothers were sold on Muddy, and of course the record changed Muddy's life. ''The little joint I was playing in doubled its business when the record came out,'' he recalled. ''Bigger joints starred looking for me. It was summer when that record came out, and I would hear it walking along the street, driving along the street. One time coming home about two or three o'clock in the morning I heard it coming from way upstairs somewhere and it scared me, I thought I had died.''
At first Leonard Chess would not record Muddy's band, apparently because he thought he had found a hit-making formula in Muddy's voice and guitar and the string bass. Of course, the records weren't really hits. They sold in an area that corresponded to the spread of the Delta's black population, from Mississippi up through Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago, with very little action in the East or the West. But within this area, sales were strong and dependable. Soon Leonard grew confident enough of Muddy's abilities to let him bring in a few more musicians, and in 1950, the year the brothers changed the name of their label from Aristocrat to Chess, Muddy showed up for a session with a young, tough-looking harmonica player from Louisiana, Little Walter Jacobs.
Walter was the first harmonica player to use his amplifier creatively. He produced massive roars, ghostly tremolos and whoops, and punching, saxophonelike solo lines on the instrument and revolutionized the sound of Chicago blues while he was with Muddy's band.
In 1951 Jimmy Rogers joined the recording group on second guitar. With Elgin Evans on drums, this was the band that defined the sound of postwar Chicago blues and sent ripples through the world of popular music that continue to be felt. Muddy was still playing country blues, but with a beat. ''My first drummer was straight down the line ''he said, ''boom boom boom boom. I had to get me somebody who would put a backbeat to it.'' Added Willie Dixon, ''You know, when you go to changing beats in music, you change the entire style. Blues or rock & roll or jazz, it's the beat that actually changes it. And that's what Muddy did. He gave his blues a little more pep.''
The band turned out great records in profusion: ''Long Distance Call,'' ''Honey Bee,'' ''She Moves Me'' and the searing ''Still a Fool'' in 1951; ''Standing Around Crying'' (with an initial appearance by the incomparable pianist Otis Spann) in 1952; and the seminal ''Hoochie Coochie Man'' in 1953. This last tune, written by Willie Dixon, is the sort of thing most people associate with Muddy – a slow, lumbering stop-time riff, lyrics that combine hoodoo imagery and machismo. It was more flamboyant than Muddy's own hoodoo blues, but it was just the kind of thing his audience wanted to hear.
''Muddy was working in this joint at 14th and Ashland,'' Dixon remembers, ''and I went over there to take him the song. We went in the washroom and sang it over and over till he got it. It didn't take very long. Then he said, 'Man, when I go out there this time, I'm gonna sing it.' He went out and jumped on it, and it sounded so good the people kept on applauding and asking for more and he kept on singing the same thing over and over again.'' There was no need for further market research. The audience was right there and not at all shy about stating its preferences. Dixon wrote more hits for Muddy, most notably ''I'm Ready'' and ''I Just Want to Make Love to You.'' They remain the most macho songs in his repertoire; Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an image, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence.
Muddy's records were never huge hits, not even among the nation's blacks. ''Hoochie Coochie Man'' made it to Number Eight on the R&B charts and ''Just Make Love to Me'' was Number Four in 1954. The band would drive from gig to gig in Muddy's Cadillac, working mostly in joints on the South and West Sides of Chicago and in the South, with occasional forays to the East. Even though he had fewer hits once rock & roll came along. Muddy was in the game for keeps. ''Rock & roll,'' he said, ''it hurt the blues pretty bad. People wanted to 'bug all the time and we couldn't play slow blues anymore. But we still hustled around and kept going. We survived, and then I went to Newport in 1960 and it started opening the door for me.''
His first crack at a white audience came in 1958, when the English promoter Chris Barber brought Waters' band to England on Big Bill Broonzy's recommendation. At first the tour seemed to be a disaster. ''Oh man,'' said Muddy, ''the headlines in all the papers was SCREAMING GUITAR AND HOWLING PIANO. Chris Barber said, 'You sound good, but don't play your amplifier so loud.' Then I came back to England in the early Sixties and everybody want to know why I didn't bring my amplifier. Those boys were playing louder than we ever played.''
''Those boys'' were the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds with young Eric Clapton, and other white blues groups that had sprung up in England, following the lead of older performers like Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, been among the few enthralled by Muddy's volume and raw power in 1958. The Stones and their contemporaries were still kids in 1960 when Muddy scored a direct hit with the folk audience at Newport, but they eagerly bought his Newport album, which included the classic extended version of ''Got My Mojo Working.'' In fact, those blue-and-white labeled Chess records from America were as important to them as eating and sleeping. They listened hard to Chuck Berry, whose first recording date was set up by Muddy, and to Bo Diddley, who also came out of the South Side. But Muddy's records had a special, mysterious luminosity. They were so distinctive, so ''deep,'' that they couldn't really be copied, not like Chuck and Bo, though the Stones tried with a brooding rendition of ''Can't Be Satisfied'' that Muddy terms ''a very good job.'' (In mid-July 1978, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts surprised Muddy by showing up to jam with him at Chicago's the Quiet Knight. Mick and Muddy had a high time trading vocal licks on ''Mannish Boy,'' and Keith played some stinging slide guitar.)
In the States too the music was reaching young whites, who were coming in, literally in many cases, through the back door. Johnny Winter, who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, remembers that ''Muddy was one of the first people I fell in love with. I guess I was about eleven. My grandparents were fairly well off and they had a maid and a guy that'd been working for them for years, and they'd have the black radio station on. I just couldn't believe that music; as soon as I heard it I was obsessed with finding out what it was and hearing more of it. Pretty soon all the record shops in town were saving me a copy of every blues record that came in.'' The process had been going on since the early Fifties, when record-store proprietors began to notice whites showing up and buying race records ''for my maid'' or ''for my yardman'' – records they'd heard their maids and yardmen bopping to and wanted to bop to themselves. By the early Sixties young white musicians were emulating the music on those backdoor records, Johnny Winter among them.
For Muddy, though, the Sixties were an unsettled and unsettling period. It was true that young whites were beginning to appreciate his blues – outside of Chicago, they made up the major part of his audience. But he was much more concerned with the blacks who were turning their backs on the blues. ''When the Rollin' Stones came through the States,'' he said, ''they came to record at the Chess studios. When that happened, I thinks to myself how these white kids was sitting down and thinking and playing the blues that my black kids was bypassing. That was a hell of a thing, man, to think about. I still think about it today. Some of these white kids are playing good blues, but my people, they want something they can bump off of. I play in places now don't have no black faces in there but our black faces.''
Muddy's recording scene was unsettled, too. His brand of blues was no longer selling, and although he continued to put together strong hands with the help of Otis Spann, his pianist, bandleader and right-hand man from the mid-Fifties until his death in the late Sixties, Muddy never again found sidemen as creative, sympathetic and cohesive as Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers. (Walter left him in 1952 when ''Juke'' became a hit, and Rogers split in 1955 to put together his own band.) Leonard Chess' son Marshall and other young executives at Chess began trying to package Muddy, starting with albums like Muddy Waters Folk Singer, which was a reasonable acoustic album, and Brass and the Blues, culminating in the dreadful Electric Mud and After the Rain, which pleased nobody. Then Chess was sold and resold. For two decades Muddy had enjoved a family-style relationship with the Chess company. Now he belonged to a succession of faceless conglomerates.
The picture began to brighten during the early Seventies. He took on Scott Cameron, a shrewd, hardheaded manager who helped him in a number of ways. They sued Arc Music, the Chess publishing company, for back royalties on scores of his compositions, and although nobody will discuss the terms of the eventual out-of-eourt settlement, apparently Muddy was at least partially satisfied. And finally he pulled free of his Chess entanglements altogether and signed in 1976 with Blue Sky Records, the Columbia-affiliated label managed by Steve Paul. With Johnny Winter as producer he made two splendid albums, Hard Again and I'm Ready. Winter wisely avoided trying to duplicate the Chess sound, but he did put Muddy back in a raw-edged, pure blues context, with sympathetic backing from former sidemen like jimmy Rogers, Big Walter Horton and James Cotton. Winter mimicked Muddy's guitar style so accurately, especially on Hard Again, that it was virtually impossible to tell which one was playing.
The records sold 50-60,000 copies each and are still moving briskly, making them the best sellers of Muddys career. He began getting better jobs for better money, especially after an all-star tour with Cotton and Winter that furnished material for a third, soon-to- be-released Blue Sky album. And he was as impressive as ever on that tour. He would start each performance sitting on his stool, letting his voice carry the music, but then he would pick up his guitar and play a wrenching slide solo, the band would begin to fly. and soon he would be up working the lip of the stage, weaving and bobbing to the music and roaring out his lyrics as if they mattered more than anything else in the world.
''This is the best point of my life I'm living right now,'' Muddy said with great finality near the end of our last conversation. I wondered how he felt about having taken so long to get to this point and he looked at me like I was a plain fool, his eyes shining with the irony that informs some of his greatest records. "Feels good,'' he said, "are you kidding? I'm glad it came before I died, I can tell you. Feels great.''
This story is from the October 5th, 1978 issue of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Issue 275: October 5, 1978
MUDDY WATERS
Artist Biography by Mark Deming
Muddy Waters was the single most important artist to emerge in post-war American blues. A peerless singer, a gifted songwriter, an able guitarist, and leader of one of the strongest bands in the genre (which became a proving ground for a number of musicians who would become legends in their own right), Waters absorbed the influences of rural blues from the Deep South and moved them uptown, injecting his music with a fierce, electric energy and helping pioneer the Chicago Blues style that would come to dominate the music through the 1950s, ‘60s, and '70s. The depth of Waters' influence on rock as well as blues is almost incalculable, and remarkably, he made some of his strongest and most vital recordings in the last five years of his life.
Waters was born McKinley Morganfield, and historians argue about some details of his early life; while he often told reporters he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi on April 4, 1915, researchers have uncovered census records and personal documents that would pin the year of his birth at 1913 or 1914, and others have cited the place of his birth as Jug's Corner, a town in Mississippi's Issaquena County. What is certain is that Morganfield's mother died when he just three years old, and from then on he was raised on the Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi by his grandmother, Della Grant. Grant is said to have given young Morganfield the nickname "Muddy" because he liked to play in the mud as a boy, and the name stuck, with "Water" and "Waters" being tacked on a few years later. The rural South was a hotbed for the blues in the '20s and ‘30s, and young Muddy became entranced with the music when he discovered a neighbor had a phonograph and records by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red.
As Muddy became more deeply immersed in the blues, he took up the harmonica; he was performing locally at parties and fish fries by the age of 13, sometimes with guitarist Scott Bohanner, who lived and worked in Stovall. In his early teens, Muddy was introduced to the sound of contemporary Delta blues artists, such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton; their music inspired Waters to switch instruments, and he bought a guitar when he was 17, learning to play in the bottleneck style. Within a few years, he was performing on his own and with a local string band, the Son Simms Four; he also opened a juke joint on the Stovall grounds, where fellow sharecroppers could listen to music, enjoy a drink or a snack, and gamble. Waters became a fixture in Mississippi, performing with the likes of Big Joe Williams and Robert Nighthawk, and in the late summer of 1941, musical archivists Alan Lomax and John Work III arrived in Mississippi with a portable recording rig, eager to document local blues talent for the Library of Congress (it's said they were hoping to locate Robert Johnson, only to learn he had died three years earlier). Lomax and Work were strongly impressed with Waters, and recorded several sides of him performing in his juke joint; two of the songs were released as a 78, and when Waters received two copies of the single and $20 from Lomax, it encouraged him to seriously consider a professional career. In July 1943, Lomax returned to record more material with Waters; these early sessions with Lomax were collected on the album Down On Stovall's Plantation in 1966, and a 1994 reissue of the material, The Complete Plantation Recordings, won a Grammy award.
In 1943, Waters decided to pull up stakes and relocate to Chicago, Illinois in hopes of making a living off his music. (He moved to St. Louis for a spell in 1940, but didn't care for it.) Waters drove a truck and worked at a paper plant by day, and at night struggled to make a name for himself, playing house parties and any bar that would have him. Big Bill Broonzy reached out to Waters and helped him land better gigs; Muddy had recently switched to electric guitar to be better heard in noisy clubs, which added a new power to his cutting slide work. By 1946, Waters had come to the attention of Okeh Records, who took him into the studio to record but chose not to release the results. A session that same year for 20th Century Records resulted in just one tune being issued as the B-side of a James "Sweet Lucy" Carter release, but Waters fared better with Aristocrat Records, a Chicago-based label founded by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. The Chess Brothers began recording Waters in 1947, and while a few early sides with Sunnyland Slim failed to make an impression, his second single for Aristocrat as a headliner, "I Can't Be Satisfied" b/w "(I Feel Like) Goin' Home," became a significant hit and launched Waters as a star on the Chicago blues scene.
Initially, the Chess Brothers recorded Waters with trusted local musicians (including Earnest "Big" Crawford and Alex Atkins), but for his live work, Waters had recruited a band which included Little Walter on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, and Baby Face Leroy Foster on drums (later replaced by Elgin Evans), and in person, Waters and his group earned their reputation as the most powerful blues band in town, with Waters' passionate vocals and guitar matched by the force of his combo. By the early '50s, the Chess Brothers (who had changed the name of their label from Aristocrat to Chess Records in 1950) began using Waters' stage band in the studio, and Little Walter in particular became a favorite with blues fans and a superb foil for Waters. Otis Spann joined Waters' group on piano in 1953, and he would become the anchor for the band well into the '60s, after Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers had left to pursue solo careers. In the '50s, Waters released some of the most powerful and influential music in the history of electric blues, scoring hits with numbers like "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" "I'm Ready," "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy," "Trouble No More," "Got My Mojo Working," and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" which made him a frequent presence on the R&B charts.
By the end of the '50s, while Waters was still making fine music, his career was going into a slump. The rise of rock & roll had taken the spotlight away from more traditional blues acts in favor of younger and rowdier acts (ironically, Waters had headlined some of Alan Freed's early "Moondog" package shows), and Waters' first tour of England in 1958 was poorly received by many U.K. blues fans, who were expecting an acoustic set and were startled by the ferocity of Waters' electric guitar. Waters began playing more acoustic music informed by his Mississippi Delta heritage in the years that followed, even issuing an album titled Muddy Waters: Folk Singer in 1964. However, the jolly irony was that British blues fans would soon rekindle interest in Waters and electric Chicago blues; as the rise of the British Invasion made the world aware of the U.K. rock scene, the nascent British blues scene soon followed, and a number of Waters' U.K. acolytes became international stars, such as Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Alexis Korner, and a modestly successful London act who named themselves after Muddy's 1950 hit "Rollin' Stone." While Waters was still leading a fine band that delivered live (and included the likes of Pinetop Perkins on piano and James Cotton on harmonica), Chess Records was moving more toward the rock, soul, and R&B marketplace, and seemed eager to market him to white rock fans, a notion that reached its nadir in 1968 with Electric Mud, in which Waters was paired up with a psychedelic rock band (featuring guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch) for rambling and aimless jams on Waters' blues classics. 1969's Fathers and Sons was a more inspired variation on this theme, with Waters playing alongside reverential white blues rockers such as Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield; 1971's The London Muddy Waters Sessions was less impressive, featuring fine guitar work from Rory Gallagher but uninspired contributions from Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Georgie Fame.
Curiously, while Chess Records helped Waters make some of the finest blues records of the '50s and ‘60s, it was the label's demise that led to his creative rebirth. In 1969, the Chess Brothers sold the label to General Recorded Tape, and the label went through a long, slow commercial decline, finally folding in 1975. (Waters would become one of several Chess artists who sued the label for unpaid royalties in its later years.) Johnny Winter, a longtime Waters fan, heard the blues legend was without a record deal, and was instrumental in getting Waters signed to Blue Sky Records, a CBS-distributed label that had become his recording home. Winter produced the sessions for Waters' first Blue Sky release, and sat in with a band comprised of members of Waters' road band (including Bob Margolin and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith) along with James Cotton on harp and Pinetop Perkins on piano. 1977's Hard Again was a triumph, sounding as raw and forceful as Waters' classic Chess sides, with a couple extra decades of experience informing his performances, and it was rightly hailed as one of the finest albums Waters ever made while sparking new interest in his music. (It also earned him a Grammy award for Best Traditional or Ethnic Folk Recording.) Waters also dazzled music fans when he appeared at the Band's celebrated farewell concert on Thanksgiving 1976 at the invitation of Levon Helm, who had helped produce one of his last Chess releases, The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. Muddy delivered a stunning performance of "Mannish Boy" that became one of the highlights of Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. Between Hard Again and The Last Waltz, Waters enjoyed a major career boost, and he found himself touring again for large and enthusiastic crowds, sharing stages with the likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, and cutting two more well-received albums with Winter as producer, 1978's I'm Ready and 1981's King Bee, as well as a solid 1979 concert set, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. Waters' health began to fail him in 1982, and his final live appearance came in the fall of that year, when he sang a few songs at an Eric Clapton show in Florida. Waters died quietly of heart failure at his home in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983. Since then, both Chicago and Westmont have named streets in Muddy's honor, he's appeared on a postage stamp, a marker commemorates the site of his childhood home in Clarksdale, and he appeared as a character in the 2008 film Cadillac Records, played by Jeffrey Wright.
https://rockhall.com/inductees/muddy-waters/bio/
MUDDY WATERS BIOGRAPHY
Muddy Waters
(vocals, guitar; born April 4, 1913, died April 30, 1983)
Muddy Waters transformed the soul of the rural South into the sound of the city, electrifying the blues at a pivotal point in the early postwar period. His recorded legacy, particularly the wealth of sides he cut in the Fifties, is one of the great musical treasures of this century. Aside from Robert Johnson, no single figure is more important in the history and development of the blues than Waters. The real question as regards his lasting impact on popular music isn’t “Who did he influence?” but - as Goldmine magazine asked in 2001 - “Who didn’t he influence?”
Above all others, it was Waters who linked the country blues of his native Mississippi Delta with the urban blues that were born in Chicago. Waters bought his first electric guitar in 1944 and revolutionized the blues with the recordings he began making in 1948. His amplified combo consisted of himself on slide guitar and vocals, a second guitarist, bass, drums, piano and harmonica. The Muddy Waters Blues Band bore all the earmarks - in terms of size, volume and attitude - of the great rock and roll bands that would follow in its wake.
He was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915. At the age of three he was sent to live with his grandmother, on the Stovall Plantation north of Clarksdale, after his mother died. There he acquired the nickname “Muddy” for his penchant for playing in nearby creeks and puddles. Waters began playing harmonica at the age of seven and took up guitar at seventeen. He picked cotton on the plantation for fifty cents a day and played music as part of a trio at fish fries and house parties on weekends. Folklorist Alan Lomax, while making field recordings for the Library of Congress, tracked down and recorded Waters in 1941 on the Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale, Miss. Several of these performances were released on Library of Congress anthologies and stand as his first recordings. In May 1943, Waters made the move from the rural plantation to the big city, heading north to Chicago by train.
Waters’ approach to the blues underwent a dramatic metamorphosis after moving to Chicago, where he befriended and played with such estimable figures as Big Bill Broonzy and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. Waters switched from acoustic to electric guitar in order to be heard over the din of patrons at the clubs he played on Chicago’s South Side. After a few false starts, Waters’ recording career began in earnest soon after pianist Sunnyland Slim introduced him to Leonard Chess, co-owner of the Aristocrat label (later Chess Records). Working at the famed Chess Studios on South Michigan Avenue, Waters cut many of the greatest recordings in the blues canon. He developed a fruitful team approach to record-making with producer Leonard Chess, bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon, and various musical associates.
In a relaxed, informal studio setting Waters and band laid down a string of citified, plugged-in electric blues that bore the rustic stamp of their Mississippi Delta underpinnings. A flood of blues-standards-to-be from Waters commenced with the 1948 release of “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” a raw, uncut Delta blues. Other classic sides included songs written for Waters by Willie Dixon ("I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready") and by Waters himself (“Mannish Boy,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’").
Waters was a fierce singer and slashing slide guitarist whose uncut blues bore the stamp of his mentors, Robert Johnson and Son House. For his own part, Waters served to mentor or at least launch many prominent blues musicians, many of whom went on to careers as bandleaders in their own right. The list of notable musicians who passed through Waters’ band includes harmonica players “Little Walter” Jacobs, “Big Walter” Horton, Junior Wells and James Cotton; guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Pat Hare, Luther Tucker and Earl Hooker; pianists Memphis Slim, Otis Spann and Pinetop Perkins; and drummers Elgin Evans, Fred Below and Francis Clay.
Waters’ greatest studio recordings were released as singles during the Fifties, and his first album - a collection of singles entitled The Best of Muddy Waters - didn’t appear until 1958. The Sixties found Waters performing to an ever-widening and appreciative audience as the younger generation acquired an insight into rock and roll’s essential grounding in the blues. In 1960, Waters performed a fiery, unforgettable set at the Newport Folk Festival, released that same year as Muddy Waters at Newport.
Waters also capitalized on the folk-music craze of the late Fifties and early Sixties with a series of albums that found him assaying acoustic blues on such albums as Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill (a tribute to rural bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, released in 1960), Muddy Waters, Folk Singer (1964) and The Real Folk Blues (1966). Less successful were attempts to contemporize his sound with such ill-advised efforts as “Muddy Waters Twist” (a 1962 single) and Electric Mud (an album of psychedelic blues from 1968). More satisfying by far were a couple of albums - Fathers and Sons (1969) and The London Muddy Waters Sessions (1972) - that found Waters accompanied by such vanguard rock musicians as Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton. His thirty-year tenure with Chess Records ended in 1975 with the release of The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. From here, he moved to the Blue Sky label (a Columbia subsidiary).
Waters’ audience grew exponentially following his electrifying performance in The Last Waltz, a film documentary (produced by Martin Scorsese) of The Band’s farewell concert. Staged at San Francisco’s Winterland ballroom, the Thanksgiving 1976 event was a star-studded affair. Water’s scalding rendition of “Mannish Boy” - on which he was accompanied by The Band and Paul Butterfield on harmonica - was an unforgettable highlight. Subsequent to that, he kept the momentum going with a series of uncompromising albums for Blue Sky that were produced by longtime fan Johnny Winter. These included Hard Again (1977), I’m Ready (1978), Muddy Mississippi Waters Live (1979) and King Bee (1981). All were critical and popular successes.
In addition to his musical legacy, Waters helped cultivate a great respect for the blues as one of its most commanding and articulate figureheads. Drummer Levon Helm of The Band, who worked with him on The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album and at The Last Waltz, had this to say about him in a Goldmine magazine interview: “Muddy taught us to take things in context, to be respectful, and to be serious about our music, as he was. He showed us music is a sacred thing.”
Waters, who remained active till the end, died of a heart attack in 1983. He was 68 years old. In the years since his death, the one-room cedar shack in which he lived on the Stovall Plantation has been preserved as a memorial to Waters’ humble origins
See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/muddy-waters/bio/#sthash.Wa95U08w.dpuf
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/muddy-waters-the-delta-son-never-sets-19781005
RS 275
The original 'Rollin' Stone' on a life with the blues
by Robert Palmer
October 5, 1978
Rolling Stone
Muddy Waters, the master bluesman, is now sixty-three. He lives out in the suburbs, almost an hour's drive from downtown Chicago and the decaying South Side where he lived for the past three decades. His white, two-story frame house sits on a quiet corner, shaded by pine trees, with nothing to let a visitor know who owns it except the small, circumspect initials MW on the front door. Inside, it's comfortable: deep carpeting in the living room, modern furniture, a big, all-electric kitchen with grandchildren and neighbors' kids constantly running through it. A few dogs, brought from the South Side where they were protectors, sleep lazily by the toolshed. It's not a pop star's house by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the kind of house very, very few of Chicago's approximately 1.5 million black people will ever own.
Muddy, who is beginning to show his age but remains a wholly commanding presence with his high cheekbones, half-lidded Oriental eyes and undiminished aura of mannish self-confidence – ''I'm a full-growed man,'' he sings, ''a natural-born lover man,'' and you believe him – takes a visitor through the house matter-of-factly, with just a hint of pride. In the small anteroom to the den he points out framed portraits of former sidemen Little Walter and James Cotton, and in the little garden patches around the house and by the concrete driveway, he indicates his cabbage, his greens, his red and green chili peppers and his okra. He doesn't brag about his successes, one suspects, because he knows he deserves them. But he certainly couldn't have imagined it all when he first got off the Illinois Central train in Chicago, back in May 1943. Except for a brief and not very satisfactory sortie to St. Louis and a few quick visits to Memphis, he had not traveled beyond the countryside and small towns of the Mississippi Delta, and he was twenty-eight years old.
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Sunnyland Slim, the pianist and singer who got Muddy his first record date with Leonard and Phil Chess in 1947, is working in the heart of the South Side, 61st and Calumet under the El stop. To find Slim, you walk into Morgen's Liquors' front door, down the bar in the middle, into the boisterous music room in the rear. Slim is sitting at a battered, red Wurlitzer electric piano, rapping out tone clusters in the treble and walking the basses with all the authority of his sixty-odd years playing blues, while Louis Myers, the leader of the band and once the guitarist in Little Walter's celebrated Aces, sings blues standards.
''I don't like to play in these kind of places no more,'' Slim says during a break, sipping from a glass of booze and pushing his weathered face up close so he can be heard over the buzz of conversation and the B.B. King record on the jukebox. ''I'll be seventy-six soon. I've just been out to California, Europe. . . . I'm just down here helping Louis out.'' He knows the subject of the conversation is supposed to be Muddy, and like Muddy, he is a proud man. ''You want to know what made Muddy popular? Leonard Chess pushed him. At that time, see, they was still playing the blues on the radio, not like it is now. Those first records he had out, a whole bunch of us had been doin' that rockin' style for years. I brought him in to play guitar for me, on that session when I made 'Johnson Machine Gun.' The man asked me, 'Say, what about your boy there, can he sing?' Talking about Muddy, you know. And I said, 'Like a bird.'''
Later, over on the North Side in a white singles bar with pinball machines and pizza, Jimmy Rogers, second guitarist on Muddy's classic blues records of the early Fifties, is setting up for a gig with the brilliant but erratic harmonica virtuoso Walter Horton. ''Muddy,'' says Rogers, ''Muddy has a whole lot of soul. Maybe it's not the words that he says so much as the way that he says 'em. He has a voice that I haven't heard anybody could imitate. They can copy his slide style of guitar, but when the voice comes in, that's different. I know his voice anywhere I hear it.''
Willie Dixon, the blues bassist, songwriter and producer, sums up peer-group opinion in a few characteristically well-chosen words: ''Everybody liked him 'cause he could really howl those blues.''
What was it about Muddy that made him so widely respected and admired, that made his blues, in his own words, ''deeper'' than the blues of his competitors? Leonard Chess did push Muddy, but he was pushing a man with extraordinary musical gifts and an extraordinary feeling for the blues.
Conventional wisdom has it that blues melodies consist of five, six or seven pitches or notes, with the third and seventh and sometimes the fifth notes of the scale being treated a little funny, flattened but not quite as flat as the black keys on the piano; these are the ''blue notes.'' But if you listen carefully to Muddy, or to any other really deep blues singer, you'll find that he systematically sings the third and, especially, the fifth notes of the scale infintesimally flatter or sharper, depending on where in the line the pitches fall and on the feelings he's trying to convey.
Muddy is the living master of these subtleties. He gets them on guitar too – listen to his slide solo on ''Honey Bee,'' on the Chess/All-Platinum Muddy Waters reissue, for example – and he's aware of getting them. ''Yeah, yeah,'' he says when he is accused of playing microtones, or notes that would fall between the cracks on the piano. ''When I plays on the stage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.''
The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Muddy Waters
Subtle as these inflections are, young guitarists can at least hope to learn to hear and execute them properly. But as Slim and Rogers and Dixon all noted, Muddy's great strength is his singing, something nobody has been able to duplicate. In addition to his mastery of pitch shadings, he also commands some remarkable textural effects. You can see him in Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz, screwing up the side of his face, shaking his jowls, constantly readjusting the shape of his mouth in order to get specific vocal sounds. And his timing is a kind of standing joke among musicians who have played with him. ''I'm a delay singer,'' he says. ''I don't sing on the beat. I sing behind it. And people have to delay to play with me. They got to hang around, wait, see what's going to happen next.''
Muddy's sovereign control of these techniques – how many other bluesmen have had comparable mastery of them? Son House? Robert Johnson? Charley Patton? – goes a long way toward explaining the absolute, unquestioned authority he radiates. It's evident that he didn't learn them in school. They could be taught, if the teacher knew them as well as Muddy does and the student were willing to put in as much time and hard work as it takes to become, say, a first-class opera diva. But in the Delta the learning process, while no less rigorous, was more diffuse.
It's important to remember that Muddy was already an established bluesman when Robert Johnson made the first of his own keening, driven recordings in 1936. In fact, Muddy was already known in Chicago. Willie Dixon, who settled in the Windy City that same year, remembers that when talk got around to serious blues singing, people from the Delta invaribly brought up Muddy. Although he heard phonograph records, the way he learned his music and the environment in which he learned it – two sides of the same coin – were almost entirely traditional.
Since Muddy was a fully formed musician by the time he arrived in Chicago, it seemed important to talk about his formative years as thoroughly as possible, and this is what we did, sitting at his kitchen table sipping Piper Heidsieck champagne and Coca Cola. He was a little reticent at first, but soon he began recalling Mississippi scenes in more detail and really enjoying himself. We rambled through that fated countryside for hours. At times the dogs in back of the house would begin to bay like hounds; Bo, his man who grew up with him on the plantation, would say something to the children in his almost impenetrable Delta accent; a suggestion of a warm breeze would waft in the screen door, and we would be there.
Muddy was born McKinly Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, April 4th, 1913. He doesn't remember anything about his parents cabin because when he was a baby his mother carried him to the country near Clarksdale, where her mother raised him. He got the nickname Muddy right away because he liked to crawl around in the mud and tried to eat it.
His grandmother lived three or four miles outside Clarksdale, on a huge plantation owned by the Stovall family. Not even white folks in the Delta had electricity in those days, and water came from a pump. Every day the able-bodied members of that household went out to work in the cotton fields. Nominally, they were farming the Stovalls' land and sharing in the proceeds from the crop. But since the Stovalls kept the books and charged the black families for seed and provisions from the plantation store, the sharecroppers usually ended up in debt after the year's tally. Men could also work for salaries, picking or chopping cotton or, later, driving a tractor. Families could raise their own vegetables and livestock to eat, milk or sell. But it was still a rough, precarious existence, one that depended on the notorious vagaries of Delta weather as much as it did on any human agency.
As far as Muddy can remember, he was born musical. ''When I was around three years old I was beatin on bucket tops and tin cans. Anything with a sound I would try to play it; I'd even take my stick and beat on the ground tryin' to get a new sound. [He still likes mud and earth. Even today, nothing seems to relax Muddy as much as getting down on his hands and knees and digging in his garden.] And whatever I beat on, I'd be hummin' my little baby song along with it. My first instrument, which a lady give me and some kids soon broke for me, was an old squeeze-box, an accordion. The next thing I had in my hand was a jew's-harp. When I was about seven I started playing the harmonica, and when I got about thirteen I was playing it very good. I should never have give it up! But when I was seventeen I switched to the guitar and put the harp down. I sold our last horse for the first guitar I had. Made fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother $7.50, I kept $7.50 and paid about $2.50 for my guitar.''
Even before he bought the guitar, Muddy was playing at country suppers and fish fries for pocket change, blowing his harp along with a guitarist friend named Scott. But once he had the guitar in his hands, Muddy learned fast. The basic Delta bluse repertoire – songs like ''Catfish Blues,'' which became the basis for Muddy's ''Rollin' Stone,'' or ''Dark Road Blues'' or ''Walkin' Blues'' – was readily accessible, since anybody who fooled with a guitar was able more or less to get through them. For fine points, there were masters to emulate: ''Charley Patton? He had so much showmanship in his thing, all this wild clownin' with the guitar, and he could holler! Ooh, what a voice. But Son House was the top man in my book. I always did like the bottleneck style, and he was the man doin' that then. And he had the kind of singing I liked, that preaching kind of singing.''
Son House occasionally renounced the blues and preached in churches, though never for very long until he left Mississippi. I wondered if Muddy went to church. ''Yes sir,'' he said, ''can't you hear it in my voice? Plenty of people would stay up all night and listen to the blues and go home, get ready and go to church. Back then, there was three things I wanted to be: a heck of a preacher, a heck of a ballplayer or a heck of a musician.''
When Muddy was twelve or thirteen, a neighbor bought a record player. and he began spending hours at her house, listening to Memphis Minnies ''Bumble Bee'' (the basis of his ''Honey Bee''), Lonnie Johnson's ''Careless Love'' and Pattons ''Pony Blues.'' When he took up the guitar, the first two songs he learned were from records: ''How Long Blues'' by Leroy Carr, a blues pianist who lived in Indianapolis, and ''Sittin' on Top of the World'' by a black string band, the Mississippi Sheiks. He played both of them with a slide, translating relatively urbane pieces into a stark, insistent Delta style.
Muddy never looked back once he established himself locally as a musician. ''I didn't like farming,'' he said. ''I always expected my guitar could beat driving tractors, plowing mules, chopping cotton, drawing water. Sometimes they'd want us to work Saturday, but – and Bo here can witness this – they'd look for me and I'd be gone, playing my guitar in the little town or in some juke joint. Was I a rambler? I rambled all the time. That's why I added that verse about the rollin' stone to 'Catfish Blues' and named it 'Rollin' Stone.' I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.'' Muddy recorded his classic rambler's boast in 1950. It furnished the name for the rock & roll band and for this magazine, ''But I didn't ramble that far,'' Muddy added. ''I was in love with my grandmother, she was getting old, and I didn't want to push out and leave her.''
Muddy married when he was eighteen. His bride was around seventeen, and they both had to lie about their ages at the Clarksdale courthouse. Since Muddy now had more responsibilities and less reason to ramble, his next move was to go into the Saturday night business for himself. ''First I'd have my own Saturday night dances. I got hip and started making and selling my own whiskey, playing for myself. I had my little crap table going in the back. I'd put coal oil in bottles, take a rope and hang 'em up there on the porch to let people know my dance was going on, and I had a lot of them lights for people to gamble by. Its pretty hard to see the dice sometimes in that lamplight. They had some fast boys with the dice down there; you had to have good eyes.''
You had to have more than that. Most gamblers carried a pistol, as Muddy did off and on for years, and most had good-luck charms made by local hoodoo doctors. Sometimes a really successful gambler would disappear for a few days or weeks and reappear with a charm he claimed to have purchased in the South's most powerful hoodoo center, New Orleans. ''We all believed in mojo hands, which is a luck charm. If you were gambling, the mojo would take care of that, you'd win, and the woman you want, you could work that on her and win. I won some money one night, so I went off and bought me a three-dollar mojo.
''The mojo doctor's hair was real white, he was a long, tall guy. He looked weird, and he had weird little tingalings hanging in his office. He got a little piece of paper, had writing on it, and he rolled it up right, sealed it in an envelope, put some perfume on the envelope. And you know what? It was five years before I won another quarter.'' Bo, who was frying some shrimp, exploded with laughter. ''Then I got mad, I got broke once in a crap game and decided I'm gonna open it and see what's in it, and it was just some little writing: 'You win, you win, you win, I win, you win, I win.' I had it read to me. It's just a con game on people's heads, you know, getting the fools. If such a thing as a mojo had've been good, you'd have had to go down to Louisiana to find one. They could have had a few things down in Louisiana doing something. But up in the Delta, nothing, I don't think.''
Muddy expanded from occasional Saturday night dances to a regular operation. By the early Forties he was running his own juke house, with a policy wheel for serious gambling, one of the new jukeboxes, his moonshine whiskey and music. Sometimes he played there alone, blowing a kazoo mounted in a neck rack and bearing down heavily on his guitar to keep people dancing. ''They'd be doing the snake hips, working their butts, you know, and all those old dances, and hollering, 'Ooh shit, play it,' and I'm just blowing on my little jazz horn and hitting on my guitar. You know, the country sounds different than in the city, the sound out there be empty. You could hear that guitar before you got to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollering.''
This was what was going on in the summer of 1941, when the pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax showed up at Stovall's plantation with his bulky portable recording rig. He was looking for folk music for the Library of Congress and he inquired after Robert Johnson, but Robert had been murdered a few years before and everyone recommended Muddy. ''He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house,'' Muddy remembered, ''and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said. 'I can do it, I can do it.'''
Lomax returned to Stovall in July 1942 and recorded Muddy again, as a soloist and with the blues fiddler Son Sims and his string band. These and the 1941 recordings are available on the album Down on Storvall's Plantation, on the Testament label, and they are phenomenal. Muddy played his steel-bodied guitar with razor-sharp accuracy, setting up hypnotic repeating patterns in the bass and filling in sharp slide figures in the treble, singing with gripping immediacy. He would rework a number of the songs he recorded for Lomax – most of which were based more or less directly on traditional pieces in the first place – into the staples of his repertoire after he got to Chicago. And once Muddy recorded for Lomax he was Chicago-bound, whether he knew it or not.
He had already been infected by a certain restlessness. ''I left my first little wife, who's dead now, God bless her, for another woman,'' he recalled, looking a little wistful for the first and only time in the conversation. ''I don't know what the hell was wrong with me; I was kind of a wild cat, man. I'd stay with her awhile and then come back and go away, and then I took this other woman from the little town next to my little town and we went and caught a train for St. Louis. But I wasn't used to the big city and didn't like it, so we went back, and I told my wife, 'Hey, I done get married, you can move out.' What a mess will country peoples do! Later I brought this woman to Chicago with me and we couldn't get along no kind of way, I had to get rid of her. Well, I was crazy, that's all.''
Muddy was bound to tangle with white authority sooner or later, and in May 1943 he had words with the overseer who ran the plantation while Mr. Stovall was away in the army. ''I asked him would he raise me to twenty-five cents an hour for driving the tractor, which is what the other people were getting, and he had a fit. When he got through stomping around, my mind just said, 'Go to Chicago.' I went to my grandmother and she said, 'Well, if you think you're going to have some problem' – you know how it was down there – 'you better go.' That was on Monday. I worked till that Thursday at five o'clock, and on Friday I came in sick and went on to Clarksdale to catch that four-o'clock train.''
What Muddy saw when he stepped off the train, still a little woozy from the all-day, all-night journey, was completely alien to the world he had known. ''I wish you could've seen me. I got off the train and it looked like this was the fastest place in the world: cabs dropping fares, horns blowing, the peoples walking so fast.''
Muddy slept on a couch in the living room of his sister's and her husbands apartment his first week in Chicago. But it was wartime. Industry was booming and manpower was scarce. Muddy got a draft call almost as soon as he arrived in the city – he'd been protected on the plantation because his job was considered vital to agriculture – but once the army learned he had quit school after the second or third grade and couldn't really read or write, they turned him down, to his great delight. He worked several factory and truck-driving jobs, took a four-room apartment, and eventually landed a job delivering Venetian blinds. He made his run in the morning, slept in the afternoon, and played at rent parties and in small taverns at night.
His music began to change. He was concentrating more on his singing and less on his guitar, and working with some other musicians from the Delta, among them pianist Eddie Boyd and guitarists Blue Smitty and Baby Face Leroy. In 1945 his grandmother died, and it was in the spring of 1946, after he returned from burying her, that he met Jimmy Rogers, then mostly a harmonica player. They formed a little group with Rogers on harp and Muddy and Smitty on guitars, and began playing around at house parties and small taverns.
''Muddy was a little older,'' Jimmy says, ''and he was the most like ol' Robert Johnson's style with the slide guitar. I understood the slide style quite well – I learned guitar in the Delta – so I could back him up good. Pretty soon Smitty and I just put Muddy as the leader, because he would do most of the rough blues singing.''
The black neighborhoods were lawless and overcrowded. New arrivals, most of them from Mississippi and neighboring states, were pushing in every day and the whites were fighting to keep them contained on the rapidly deteriorating South and West Sides. The blues scene was transitional. Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and some other Southern bluesmen who had been popular before the war were still the kingpins, largely because of their recording connections. But Muddy and his friends were part of a new wave of musicians who played a harder, more down-home brand of blues, the kind that was being heard in Southern juke joints. In order to cut through crowd noise and compete with the volume of the jukeboxes, these younger bluesmen bought amplifiers, which became mandatory once they began to contend with the decibel level in rowdy city taverns. As the migrants continued to pour in, Muddy's electrified country blues became more and more popular.
Muddy recorded three songs for Columbia in 1946, but they were never issued. In 1947 he was in the studio again, playing guitar for Sunnyland Slim and cutting two numbers of his own for the Aristocrat label, with Slim featured on the piano – ''Gypsy Woman,'' his first recorded blues on a hoodoo theme, and ''Little Anna Mae.'' Leonard and Phil Chess, two Polish immigrants who had started Aristocrat that year to record music aimed at the patrons of their South Side nightclub, didn't know what to make of Muddy's raw sound and shelved the records. But early in 1948 Leonard Chess, who handled the producing end of the business, called Muddy back to cut two more sides, which turned out to be reworkings of two of the traditional blues he'd recorded for Lomax. They were ''I Can't Be Satisfied'' and ''I Feel like Going Home.'' Singing at peak power and playing magnificent electric slide guitar, backed only by Big Crawford's string bass, Muddy was just too impressive to ignore.
Leonard Chess knew very little about down-home blues, having recorded mostly tenor-saxophone instrumental by the jazz-oriented performers who worked in his club, but he put the record out. To his surprise, it became Aristocrat's biggest seller. From that point on the Chess brothers were sold on Muddy, and of course the record changed Muddy's life. ''The little joint I was playing in doubled its business when the record came out,'' he recalled. ''Bigger joints starred looking for me. It was summer when that record came out, and I would hear it walking along the street, driving along the street. One time coming home about two or three o'clock in the morning I heard it coming from way upstairs somewhere and it scared me, I thought I had died.''
At first Leonard Chess would not record Muddy's band, apparently because he thought he had found a hit-making formula in Muddy's voice and guitar and the string bass. Of course, the records weren't really hits. They sold in an area that corresponded to the spread of the Delta's black population, from Mississippi up through Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago, with very little action in the East or the West. But within this area, sales were strong and dependable. Soon Leonard grew confident enough of Muddy's abilities to let him bring in a few more musicians, and in 1950, the year the brothers changed the name of their label from Aristocrat to Chess, Muddy showed up for a session with a young, tough-looking harmonica player from Louisiana, Little Walter Jacobs.
Walter was the first harmonica player to use his amplifier creatively. He produced massive roars, ghostly tremolos and whoops, and punching, saxophonelike solo lines on the instrument and revolutionized the sound of Chicago blues while he was with Muddy's band.
In 1951 Jimmy Rogers joined the recording group on second guitar. With Elgin Evans on drums, this was the band that defined the sound of postwar Chicago blues and sent ripples through the world of popular music that continue to be felt. Muddy was still playing country blues, but with a beat. ''My first drummer was straight down the line ''he said, ''boom boom boom boom. I had to get me somebody who would put a backbeat to it.'' Added Willie Dixon, ''You know, when you go to changing beats in music, you change the entire style. Blues or rock & roll or jazz, it's the beat that actually changes it. And that's what Muddy did. He gave his blues a little more pep.''
The band turned out great records in profusion: ''Long Distance Call,'' ''Honey Bee,'' ''She Moves Me'' and the searing ''Still a Fool'' in 1951; ''Standing Around Crying'' (with an initial appearance by the incomparable pianist Otis Spann) in 1952; and the seminal ''Hoochie Coochie Man'' in 1953. This last tune, written by Willie Dixon, is the sort of thing most people associate with Muddy – a slow, lumbering stop-time riff, lyrics that combine hoodoo imagery and machismo. It was more flamboyant than Muddy's own hoodoo blues, but it was just the kind of thing his audience wanted to hear.
''Muddy was working in this joint at 14th and Ashland,'' Dixon remembers, ''and I went over there to take him the song. We went in the washroom and sang it over and over till he got it. It didn't take very long. Then he said, 'Man, when I go out there this time, I'm gonna sing it.' He went out and jumped on it, and it sounded so good the people kept on applauding and asking for more and he kept on singing the same thing over and over again.'' There was no need for further market research. The audience was right there and not at all shy about stating its preferences. Dixon wrote more hits for Muddy, most notably ''I'm Ready'' and ''I Just Want to Make Love to You.'' They remain the most macho songs in his repertoire; Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an image, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence.
Muddy's records were never huge hits, not even among the nation's blacks. ''Hoochie Coochie Man'' made it to Number Eight on the R&B charts and ''Just Make Love to Me'' was Number Four in 1954. The band would drive from gig to gig in Muddy's Cadillac, working mostly in joints on the South and West Sides of Chicago and in the South, with occasional forays to the East. Even though he had fewer hits once rock & roll came along. Muddy was in the game for keeps. ''Rock & roll,'' he said, ''it hurt the blues pretty bad. People wanted to 'bug all the time and we couldn't play slow blues anymore. But we still hustled around and kept going. We survived, and then I went to Newport in 1960 and it started opening the door for me.''
His first crack at a white audience came in 1958, when the English promoter Chris Barber brought Waters' band to England on Big Bill Broonzy's recommendation. At first the tour seemed to be a disaster. ''Oh man,'' said Muddy, ''the headlines in all the papers was SCREAMING GUITAR AND HOWLING PIANO. Chris Barber said, 'You sound good, but don't play your amplifier so loud.' Then I came back to England in the early Sixties and everybody want to know why I didn't bring my amplifier. Those boys were playing louder than we ever played.''
''Those boys'' were the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds with young Eric Clapton, and other white blues groups that had sprung up in England, following the lead of older performers like Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, been among the few enthralled by Muddy's volume and raw power in 1958. The Stones and their contemporaries were still kids in 1960 when Muddy scored a direct hit with the folk audience at Newport, but they eagerly bought his Newport album, which included the classic extended version of ''Got My Mojo Working.'' In fact, those blue-and-white labeled Chess records from America were as important to them as eating and sleeping. They listened hard to Chuck Berry, whose first recording date was set up by Muddy, and to Bo Diddley, who also came out of the South Side. But Muddy's records had a special, mysterious luminosity. They were so distinctive, so ''deep,'' that they couldn't really be copied, not like Chuck and Bo, though the Stones tried with a brooding rendition of ''Can't Be Satisfied'' that Muddy terms ''a very good job.'' (In mid-July 1978, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts surprised Muddy by showing up to jam with him at Chicago's the Quiet Knight. Mick and Muddy had a high time trading vocal licks on ''Mannish Boy,'' and Keith played some stinging slide guitar.)
In the States too the music was reaching young whites, who were coming in, literally in many cases, through the back door. Johnny Winter, who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, remembers that ''Muddy was one of the first people I fell in love with. I guess I was about eleven. My grandparents were fairly well off and they had a maid and a guy that'd been working for them for years, and they'd have the black radio station on. I just couldn't believe that music; as soon as I heard it I was obsessed with finding out what it was and hearing more of it. Pretty soon all the record shops in town were saving me a copy of every blues record that came in.'' The process had been going on since the early Fifties, when record-store proprietors began to notice whites showing up and buying race records ''for my maid'' or ''for my yardman'' – records they'd heard their maids and yardmen bopping to and wanted to bop to themselves. By the early Sixties young white musicians were emulating the music on those backdoor records, Johnny Winter among them.
For Muddy, though, the Sixties were an unsettled and unsettling period. It was true that young whites were beginning to appreciate his blues – outside of Chicago, they made up the major part of his audience. But he was much more concerned with the blacks who were turning their backs on the blues. ''When the Rollin' Stones came through the States,'' he said, ''they came to record at the Chess studios. When that happened, I thinks to myself how these white kids was sitting down and thinking and playing the blues that my black kids was bypassing. That was a hell of a thing, man, to think about. I still think about it today. Some of these white kids are playing good blues, but my people, they want something they can bump off of. I play in places now don't have no black faces in there but our black faces.''
Muddy's recording scene was unsettled, too. His brand of blues was no longer selling, and although he continued to put together strong hands with the help of Otis Spann, his pianist, bandleader and right-hand man from the mid-Fifties until his death in the late Sixties, Muddy never again found sidemen as creative, sympathetic and cohesive as Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers. (Walter left him in 1952 when ''Juke'' became a hit, and Rogers split in 1955 to put together his own band.) Leonard Chess' son Marshall and other young executives at Chess began trying to package Muddy, starting with albums like Muddy Waters Folk Singer, which was a reasonable acoustic album, and Brass and the Blues, culminating in the dreadful Electric Mud and After the Rain, which pleased nobody. Then Chess was sold and resold. For two decades Muddy had enjoved a family-style relationship with the Chess company. Now he belonged to a succession of faceless conglomerates.
The picture began to brighten during the early Seventies. He took on Scott Cameron, a shrewd, hardheaded manager who helped him in a number of ways. They sued Arc Music, the Chess publishing company, for back royalties on scores of his compositions, and although nobody will discuss the terms of the eventual out-of-eourt settlement, apparently Muddy was at least partially satisfied. And finally he pulled free of his Chess entanglements altogether and signed in 1976 with Blue Sky Records, the Columbia-affiliated label managed by Steve Paul. With Johnny Winter as producer he made two splendid albums, Hard Again and I'm Ready. Winter wisely avoided trying to duplicate the Chess sound, but he did put Muddy back in a raw-edged, pure blues context, with sympathetic backing from former sidemen like jimmy Rogers, Big Walter Horton and James Cotton. Winter mimicked Muddy's guitar style so accurately, especially on Hard Again, that it was virtually impossible to tell which one was playing.
The records sold 50-60,000 copies each and are still moving briskly, making them the best sellers of Muddys career. He began getting better jobs for better money, especially after an all-star tour with Cotton and Winter that furnished material for a third, soon-to- be-released Blue Sky album. And he was as impressive as ever on that tour. He would start each performance sitting on his stool, letting his voice carry the music, but then he would pick up his guitar and play a wrenching slide solo, the band would begin to fly. and soon he would be up working the lip of the stage, weaving and bobbing to the music and roaring out his lyrics as if they mattered more than anything else in the world.
''This is the best point of my life I'm living right now,'' Muddy said with great finality near the end of our last conversation. I wondered how he felt about having taken so long to get to this point and he looked at me like I was a plain fool, his eyes shining with the irony that informs some of his greatest records. "Feels good,'' he said, "are you kidding? I'm glad it came before I died, I can tell you. Feels great.''
This story is from the October 5th, 1978 issue of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Issue 275: October 5, 1978
http://www.biography.com/people/muddy-waters-9525002
Muddy Waters Biography
Guitarist, Songwriter, Singer (1915–1983)
Name
Muddy Waters
Occupation
Guitarist, Songwriter, Singer
Birth Date
April 4, 1915
Death Date
April 30, 1983
Place of Birth
Rolling Fork, Mississippi
Place of Death
Westmont, Illinois
AKA
Muddy Waters
Full Name
McKinley Morganfield
Synopsis
Early Life
Chicago and Mainstream Success
Later Career
Death and Legacy
American singer and guitarist Muddy Waters may have been born in Mississippi, but he defined Chicago blues with songs like "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man."
Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1915, in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Waters grew up immersed in the Delta blues, and was first recorded by archivist Alan Lomax. In 1943, he moved to Chicago and began playing in clubs. A record deal followed, and hits like "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" and "Rollin' Stone" made him an iconic Chicago blues man.
Early Life
Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1915, in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a rural town on the Mississippi River. He was given the moniker "Muddy Waters" because he played in the swampy puddles of the Mississippi River as a boy. His father, Ollie Morganfield, was a farmer and a blues guitar player who separated from the family shortly after Waters was born. When Waters was just 3 years old, his mother, Bertha Jones, died, and he was subsequently sent to Clarksdale to live with his maternal grandmother, Delia Jones.
Waters began to play the harmonica around the age of 5, and became quite good. He received his first guitar at age 17, and taught himself to play by listening to recordings of Mississippi blues legends such as Charley Patton. Although Waters spent countless hours working as a sharecropper at a cotton plantation, he found time to entertain folks around town with his music. In 1941, he joined the Silas Green Tent Show and began to travel. As he began to gain recognition, his ambition grew. Then, after Alan Lomax and John Work, archivists/researchers for the Library of Congress Field Recording project caught wind of Waters's unique style, they sought him out to make a recording. The songs "Can't Be Satisfied" and "Feel Like Going Home," were among his first recorded.
Chicago and Mainstream Success
In 1943, Muddy Waters finally picked up and headed to Chicago, Illinois, where music was shaping a generation. The following year, his uncle gave him an electric guitar. It was with this guitar that he was able to develop the legendary style that transformed the rustic blues of the Mississippi with the urban vibe of the big city.
Working at a paper mill by day, Waters was sweeping the blues scene by night. By 1946, he had grown so popular that he had begun making recordings for big record companies such as RCA, Colombia and Aristocrat. (He landed a deal with Aristocrat with help of fellow Delta man Sunnyland Smith.) But his recordings with Aristocrat received little recognition. It wasn't until 1950, when Aristocrat became Chess Records, that Waters's career really began to take off. With hits like "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" and "Got My Mojo Working," his sensual lyrics peaked interest in the young crowds of the city. "Rollin' Stone," one of his singles, became so popular that it went on to influence the name of the major music magazine as well as one of the most famous rock bands to date.
Later Career
By 1951, Muddy Waters had established a full band with Otis Spann on piano, Little Walter on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on second guitar and Elgin Evans on drums. The band's recordings were increasingly popular in New Orleans, Chicago and the Delta region in the United States, but it wasn't until 1958, when the group brought their electric blues sound to England, that Muddy Waters became an international star. After the English tour, Waters's fan base expanded and began to catch the attention of the rock 'n' roll community. His performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival was a particularly pivotal point in his career, as it caught the attention of a new fan base. Waters was able to adapt to the changing times, and his electric blues sound fit in well with the "love generation."
Waters continued to record with rock musicians throughout the 1960s and '70s, and won his first Grammy Award in 1971 for the album They Call me Muddy Waters. After his 30-year run with Chess Records, he went his separate way in 1975, suing the record company for royalties after his final release with them: Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. Waters signed on with Blue Sky Label after the split. He then captivated audiences with his appearance in The Band's farewell performance, known as "The Last Waltz," an exceptionally star-studded affair that was released as a film by Martin Scorsese in 1978.
Death and Legacy
By the end of his lifetime, Muddy Waters had garnered six Grammys as well as countless other honors. He died after suffering a heart attack on April 30, 1983, in Downers Grove, Illinois.
Since his death, Waters's contribution to the music world has continued to gain recognition. In 1987, Waters was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Five years later, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the musician a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. Additionally, some of the most recognizable names in music have named Muddy Waters as their single-greatest influence, including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Johnny Winter.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Muddy_Waters.aspx
Contemporary Musicians | 1991 | Stone, Calen
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.
Muddy Waters
Blues slide guitarist, harmonica player
For the Record…
Selected discography
Sources
How many blues artists could boast of an alumni of band members that includes Otis Spann, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Fred Below, Walter Morton, Jimmy Rogers, James Cotton, Leroy Foster, Buddy Guy, Luther Johnson, Willie Dixon, Hubert Sumlin, and Earl Hooker, just to name a few? Muddy Waters gave these and many more their first big break in music while creating a style known now as Chicago blues (guitar, piano, bass, drums, and harmonica).
“Contemporary Chicago blues starts, and in some ways may very well end, with Muddy Waters,” wrote Peter Guralnick in Listener’s Guide To The Blues. From the 1950s until his death in 1983, Waters literally ruled the Windy City with a commanding stage presence that combined both dignity and raw sexual appeal with a fierce and emotional style of slide guitar playing.
Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915 but grew up in Clarksdale, where his grandmother raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for playing in mud earned him his nickname at an early age. Waters started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties and fish fries, emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. “His thick heavy tone, the dark coloration of his voice and his firm almost stolid manner were all clearly derived from House,” wrote Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, “but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson.”
In 1940 Waters moved to St. Louis before playing with Silas Green a year later and returning back to Mississippi. In the early part of the decade he ran a juke house, complete with gambling, moonshine, a jukebox, and live music courtesy of Muddy himself. In the summer of 1941 Alan Lomax came to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record various country blues musicians. “He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house,” Waters recalled in Rolling Stone, “and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ’I can do it, I can do it.’” Lomax came back again in July of 1942 to record Waters again. Both sessions were eventually released as Down On Stovall’s Plantation on the Testament label.
In 1943 Waters headed north to Chicago in hopes of becoming a full-time professional. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and
For the Record…
Real name, McKinley Morganfield; born April 4, 1915, in Rolling Fork, Miss.; died April 30, 1983; son of Ollie Morganfield (a farmer) and Bertha Jones; married first wife, Geneva, 1940 (died, 1973), married Marva Jean King, 1978; children: one son, three daughters, one stepson.
Began playing guitar at parties and fish fries by age 17; ran a juke house during early 1940s; moved to Chicago in 1943, playing guitar in clubs at night while working in factories and driving a truck during the day; signed with Chess Records, 1946; leader of his own rhythm and blues/blues band, 1950-56; featured headline guitarist, 1956-83.
Awards: Winner of down beat Critics Poll as male singer deserving wider recognition, 1964, and down beat’s International Critics Award for best best rock-pop-blues group, 1968 and 1969; Grammy Award for best ethnic/traditional recording, 1971, for They Call Me Muddy Waters, 1972, for The London Muddy Waters Sessions, and 1975, for Muddy Waters at Woodstock; Billboard magazine’s Trendsetter Award, 1971; recipient of Ebony Readers’ Poll Black Hall of Fame Award, 1973.
working in a factory by day and playing at night. Big Bill Broonzy was the top cat in Chicago until his death in 1958 and the city was a very competitive market for a newcomer to become established. Broonzy helped Waters out by letting him open for the star in the rowdy clubs. In 1945 Waters’s uncle gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds.
In 1946 Waters recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they were never released. Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat, a newly-formed label run by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess. In 1947 Waters played guitar with Sunnyland Slim on piano on the cuts “Gypsy Woman” and “Little Anna Mae.” These were also shelved, but in 1948 Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” became big and his popularity in clubs began to take off. Soon after, Aristocrat changed their name to Chess and Waters’s signature tune, “Rollirï Stone,” became a smash hit.
The Chess brothers would not allow Waters to use his own musicians (Jimmy Rogers and Blue Smitty) in the studio; instead he was only provided with a backing bass by Big Crawford. However, by 1950 Waters was recording with perhaps the hottest blues group ever: Little Walter Jacobs on harp; Jimmy Rogers on guitar; Elgin Evans on drums; Otis Spann on piano; Big Crawford on bass; and Waters handling vocals and slide guitar. The band recorded a string of great blues classics during the early 1950’s with the help of bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon’s pen. “Hoochie Coochie Man” (Number 8 on the R & B charts), “I Just Want To Make Love To You” (Number 4), and “I’m Ready.” These three were “the most macho songs in his repertoire,” wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. “Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an’mage, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence.”
Waters was at the height of his career and his band steamed like a high-powered locomotive, cruising form club to club as the Headhunters, crushing any other blues band that challenged their musical authority. “By the time he achieved his popular peak, Muddy Waters had become a shouting, declamatory kind of singer who had forsaken his guitar as a kind of anachronism and whose band played with a single pulsating rhythm,” wrote Guralnick in his Listener’s Guide.
Unfortunately, Waters’s success as the frontman led others in his group to seek the same recognition. In 1953 Little Walter left when his “Juke” became a hit and in 1955 Rogers quit to form his own band. Waters could never recapture the glory of his pre-1956 years as the pressures of being a leader led him to use various studio musicians for quite a few years following.
He headed to England in 1958 and shocked his overseas audiences with loud, amplified electric guitar and a thunderous beat. When R & B began to die down shortly after, Waters switched back to his older style of country blues. His gig at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 turned on a whole new generation to Waters’s Delta sound. As English rockers like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones got hip to the blues, Waters switched back to electric circa 1964. He expressed anger when he realized that members of his own race were turning their backs to the genre while the white kids were showing respect and love for it.
However, for the better part of twenty years (since his last big hit in 1956, “I’m Ready”) Waters was put on the back shelf by the Chess label and subjected to all sorts of ridiculous album themes:Brass And The Blues, Electric Mud, etc. In 1972 he went back to England to record The London Muddy Waters Sessions with four hotshot rockers—Rory Gallagher, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Mitch Mitchell—but their playing wasn’t up to his standards. “These boys are top musicians, they can play with me, put the book before ’em and play it, you know,” he told Guralnick. “But that ain’t what I need to sell my people, it ain’t the Muddy Waters sound. An if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man.”
Waters sound was basically Delta country blues electrified, but his use of microtones, in both his vocals and slide playing, made it extremely difficult to duplicate and follow correctly. “When I plays onstage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me,” he said in Rolling Stone. “But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.”
Fortunately for Waters and his fans there was one man who understood the feeling he was trying to convey: Johnny Winter, an albino Texan who could play some of the nastiest guitar east or west of the Mississippi. In 1976 Winter convinced his label, Blue Sky, to sign Waters and the beginning of a fruitful partnership was begun. Waters’s “comeback” LP, Hard Again, was recorded in just two days and was as close to the original Chicago sound he had created as anyone could ever hope for. Winter produced/played and pushed the master to the limit. Former Waters sideman James Cotton kicked in on harp on the Grammy Award winning album and a brief but incredible tour followed. “He sounds happy, energetic and out for business,” stated Dan Oppenheimer in Rolling Stone. “In short, Muddy Waters is kicking in another mule’s stall.”
In 1978 Winter recruited Walter Horton and Jimmy Rogers to help out on Waters’s I’m Ready LP and another impressive outing was in the can. The roll continued in 1979 with the blistering Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live. “Muddy was loose for this one,” wrote Jas Obrecht in Guitar Player, “and the result is the next best thing to being ringside at one of his foot-thumping, head-nodding, downhome blues shows.” King Seethe following year concluded Water’s reign at Blue Sky and all four LP’s turned out to be his biggest-selling albums ever.
In 1983 Muddy Waters passed away in his sleep. At his funeral, throngs of blues musicians showed up to pay tribute to one of the true originals of the art form. “Muddy was a master of just the right notes,” John Hammond, Jr., told Guitar World. “It was profound guitar playing, deep and simple… more country blues transposed to the electric guitar, the kind of playing that enhanced the lyrics, gave profundity to the words themselves.” Two years after his death, the city that made Muddy Waters (and vice versa) honored their father by changing the name of 43rd Street to Muddy Waters Drive. Following Waters’s death, B.B. King told Guitar World, “It’s going to be years and years before most people realize how great he was to American music.”
Selected discography:
Released on Chess
Muddy Waters at Newport, 1960;reissued, 1987.
Folk Singer, 1964; reissued, 1987.
Muddy Waters, 1964.
Brass and the Blues, 1966.
The Real Folk Blues, 1966; reissued, 1988.
Electric Mud, 1968.
After the Rain, 1969.
Fathers and Sons, 1969.
They Call Me Muddy Waters, c. 1969.
The London Muddy Waters Sessions, 1972; reissued, 1989.
McKinley Morganfield, 1972.
Muddy Waters Live, 1972.
Can’t Get No Grindin’, 1973.
Unk in Funk, 1974.
Muddy Waters at Woodstock, 1975.
The Best of Muddy Waters (1948-1954), 1987.
Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill Broonzy, 1960; reissued, 1987.
Troubles No More: Singles, 1955-1959, 1989.
Released on Blue Sky
Hard Again, 1977.
I’m Ready, 1978.
Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live, 1979.
King Bee, 1981.
Released on other labels
Afro-American Blues and Game Songs, Library of Congress, c. 1942.
Down on Stovall’s Plantation, Testament, c. 1942. Chicago Blues: The Beginning, Testament, 1971.
Muddy Waters: The Chess Box, Chess/MCA, 1989.
Sources
Books:
Christgau, Robert, Christgau’s Record Guide, Ticknor & Fields, 1981.
Guralnick, Peter, Feel Like Going Home, Vintage Books, 1981.
Guralnick, Peter, The Listener’s Guide to the Blues, Facts on File, 1982.
Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who’s Who, Da Capo, 1979.
Kozinn, Allan, Pete Welding, Dan Forte, and Gene Santoro, The Guitar: The History The Music The Players, Quill, 1984.
The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh with John Swenson, Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1979.
Periodicals:
Guitar Player, July 1979; July 1983; August 1983.
Guitar World, September 1983; January 1986; March 1989; March 1990.
Living Blues, September-October 1989.
Rolling Stone, March 24, 1977; October 5, 1978.
—Calen D. Stone
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/muddy-waters-is-born
When Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he permanently alienated a portion of his passionate fan base. When Muddy Waters went electric roughly 20 years earlier, he didn’t have a fan base to be concerned about, and those who did go to his shows probably had no quarrel with his motivation for plugging in, which was simply to play loud enough to be heard inside a raucous nightclub. Little could those lucky Chicagoans have known that they were hearing the birth of a style of blues that would become a fundamental part of their city’s cultural identity. Out of all the bluesmen plying their trade in the clubs of the Windy City in the late 40s and early 50s, none did more than Muddy Waters to create the Chicago Blues—the hard-driving, amplified, distinctly urban sound with roots in the rural Mississippi Delta, where Waters was born on this day in 1913.
Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played and sang at parties and fish fries from the age of 17, spending his days picking cotton on the Stovall Plantation for 50 cents a day. In 1941, folklorist Alan Lomax, on his famous trip through the Delta on behalf of the Library of Congress, discovered Waters and made the first recordings of his slide-guitar blues, released many years later as the “Plantation Recordings.” By 1944, Waters had joined the Great Migration that took African Americans by the hundreds of thousands north to cities like Chicago. It was there that his country blues evolved into the aggressive Chicago Blues exemplified on famous songs like “Rollin’ Stone,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Mannish Boy” and “Got My Mojo Working.”
The first of those songs would later provide songwriting inspiration to Bob Dylan and the idea for a name to a famous British rock group. The Rolling Stones were just one of hundreds of blues-based groups that formed in England in the early 1960s, inspired in part by Muddy Waters’ records and by his tour of Britain in 1958. Waters would be regarded as a blues giant on the strength of his 1947-1958 Chess Records recordings alone, but it was the influence of those records on a young generation of British musicians that formed the basis for his inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Born on this day in 1913, Muddy Waters died near his adopted hometown of Chicago on April 30, 1983.
http://www.msbluestrail.org/blues-trail-markers/muddy-waters-birthplace
Muddy Waters Birthplace - Rolling Fork
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, was one of the foremost artists in blues history. In the late 1940s and 1950s he led the way in transforming traditional Delta blues into the electric Chicago blues style that paved the road to rock 'n' roll. Waters was born in the Jug's Corner community of rural Issaquena County but always claimed Rolling Fork as his birthplace. His birth date has been cited as April 4, 1913, 1914, or 1915.
His grandmother, Della Grant, nicknamed him “Muddy” because, as a baby on the Cottonwood Plantation near Mayersville, he loved to play in the mud. Childhood playmates tagged on “Water” or “Waters” a few years later. His father, Ollie Morganfield, was a sharecropper in the Rolling Fork area who also entertained at local blues affairs. But Waters was raised by his grandmother, who moved to the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale when he was still a young child, and his influences were Delta musicians such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Robert Nighthawk. Muddy first played harmonica with Stovall guitarist Scott Bohanner, but took up guitar under the older musician's tutelage, and later performed with another mentor, blues legend Big Joe Williams. He also played in a string band, the Son Sims Four, and drove a tractor on the Stovall Plantation, where he ran a juke joint out of his house.
Waters did his first recordings at Stovall in 1941-42 for a Library of Congress team led by Alan Lomax and John Work III. In 1943 he moved to Chicago, and by the end of the decade he was setting the pace on the competitive Chicago blues scene. The city was loaded with freshly arriving talent from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana as southern farm workers continued to migrate to the alleged “promised land” of the north. Many of the finest musicians, including harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs, pianist Otis Spann, and guitarist Jimmy Rogers, worked in the seminal Muddy Waters Blues Band, which virtually defined the Chicago blues genre. Both through his recordings on the Aristocrat and Chess labels and through his sensual and electrifying live performances, he not only became a blues icon but a godfather to generations of rock 'n' roll bands, as he expanded his audience from the African American clubs of Chicago's South and West sides to Europe and beyond. The Rolling Stones recorded several of his songs and took their name from one of his early records, “Rollin' Stone.” Jazz, R&B, country & western, and hip hop artists have used his material as well.
Other Muddy Waters classics, many written by Vicksburg native Willie Dixon, include “Got My Mojo Working,” “Manish Boy,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “I'm Ready.” Waters returned to visit or perform in Mississippi on occasion, and appeared at the Greenville V.F.W., the Ole Miss campus, and the 1981 Delta Blues Festival. A recipient of multiple Grammy awards, charter member of the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame, and 1987 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Muddy Waters died in his sleep on April 30, 1983, at his home in Westmont, Illinois.
content © Mississippi Blues Commission
http://www.musictimes.com/articles/34372/20150404/5-ways-muddy-waters-changed-music-amplified-blues-chuck-berry.htm
5 Ways Muddy Waters Changed Music: Amplified Blues, Chuck Berry and More (A 100th Birthday Tribute)
by Ryan Book,
The Music Times
Apr 4, 2015
Muddy Waters (Photo : Getty Images)
Today marks what would've been the 100th birthday of blues legend McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfeld. Kind of. Different sources have indicated different birth dates and years for the music icon. The guitarist himself claimed in interviews that he was born during 1915 and his tombstone bears the same date. Other sources, such as his application for a social security card and his marriage license, suggest that the true date was during 1913. Although the latter is generally considered to be the correct date, this site didn't exist during 2013 to celebrate it, and we'll take any chance we can get to celebrate one of the most influential performers of all time. Still waters run deep, but Muddy Waters runs deeper. Here are 5 ways modern music would be different without the legend:
01) Guitar amplification
Muddy Waters did not invent the electric guitar or the amplifier. His use of those products however, would alter the face of the music industry. The blues had a tremendous influence on rock 'n' roll of course, however it wasn't until after the rock revolution of the mid-'50s that the blues finally got loud. If you want to categorize the genre as loosley as possible, the blues can be separated into the Delta blues and Chicago blues eras: The former, from the birth of the genre on, featured acoustic instruments. The latter variety, more familiar to modern listeners, emphasized the electric guitar and raucous playing that would influence every genre from psychedelia to heavy metal. The birthplace of electric blues is suggested to be Waters' 1958 English tour. No records suggest how crowds reacted to the sound, but considering the bedlam Bob Dylan's adoption of the electric instrument caused, it must have upset purists greatly. Billy Gibbons—guitarist for ZZ Top—explained the thought process while writing an essay on Waters for Rolling Stone when it ranked the bluesman the no. 17 greatest artist of all time: "People call his sound raw and dirty and gritty, but it wasn't particularly loud. It just sounded that way. A guitar amplifier in the Fifties was maybe the size of a tabletop radio. To be heard over a party, you had to crank that thing as loud as it would go. And then you left behind all semblance of circuit design and entered the elegant field of distortion that made everything so much deeper. If you didn't have a big band with 20 guys, you had 20 watts." Blues would never be the same.
02) Chuck Berry
So Waters began amplifying his guitar after the advent of rock 'n' roll...that's not to say that he didn't have a dramatic impact on its history as we know it. Waters was ranked the no. 17 greatest artist of all time on Rolling Stone's list, but if it weren't for his influence then perhaps the no. 5 artist on that same list may have never come to the attention of the rock-hungry nation. Chuck Berry was a talented, lightning-rod performer—he didn't need any help learning how to handle the instrument. He needed a record label to find him however. He travelled to Chicago, then the capital of blues, during 1955 and met Waters. The icon thought Berry had what it took, and he put the young guitarist in touch with Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Interestingly, Chess liked Berry's country covers more, and the guitarist recorded a cover of Bob Wills' "Ira Red," which would be titled "Maybellene," now considered to be in the Top 100 songs of the 20th Century. Again, Berry had the talent by himself, but it takes good fortune to land a record deal. Without Waters, who knows how this story might have changed?
03) Oh, and all the other greatest guitarists of all time
Berry felt the direct impact of assistance from Waters, but many of the best felt his influence in their own style. Although Gibbons hinted that Waters was not intentionally attempting to create the amplified, distorted monster that he did, that sound became something desirable, that future guitarists would actively seek out. One such guitarist was Jimi Hendrix, now regarded by most to be the greatest in the history of the instrument for both his talent and experimentation. He famously described his first encounter with Waters' music: "The first guitar player I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I first heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death." Eric Clapton professed that "all [he] ever wanted to do was play like Muddy Waters. The blues legend played his last show ever with Clapton, who had also served as his best man at his wedding in 1979. "It's going to be years and years before most people realize how greatly he contributed to American music," B.B. King said, following Waters' death. It may not have taken as long as he thought.
04) The Rolling Stone lore
Perhaps you've noticed how rife the history of rock 'n' roll is with references to a certain boulder-in-motion. Waters didn't come up with the traditional wisdom that a "rolling stone gathers no moss," but he did record the 1950 single "Rollin' Stone," a song that inspired a group of young, British rockers to adopt the name during the early '60s, and that would also inspire journalist Jann Wenner to name his new music magazine the same thing during 1967. It's tough to argue that the imagery of the "Rolling Stone" didn't play a role in influencing Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," especially considering how heavy it was in comparison to the folk performer's previous work (like Waters did on his '58 tour). The same applies to the 1971 Temptations classic "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone."
05) Dozens of songs you already know
Plenty of Waters' hits (some of which were written with Willie Dixon) have become standards for rockers, as is to be expected: The Allman Brothers made a new hit out of "Hoochie Coochie Man," Etta James made a hit out of "I Just Want To Make Love To You" and Cream introduced itself to the world with "Rollin' and Tumblin'." The biggest songs that have a hint of Waters within aren't obvious covers however. Led Zeppelin is notorious for making "new" hits out of old subject matter, and indeed "Whole Lotta Love" derives from "You Need Love." AC/DC has been a tad more forthright in acknowledging that its own "You Shook Me All Night Long" was inspired by Waters' "You Shook Me."
http://www.nathanielturner.com/muddywaters.htm
Muddy Waters CDs
The Anthology: 1947-1972 / A Tribute to Muddy Waters: King of the Blues / King of Chicago Blues Electric Mud At Newport
The Muddy Waters Story / Can't Get No Grindin'
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Muddy Waters I Can’t Be Satisfied on PBS
Reviewed by Amin Sharif
Today, there are relatively few young blacks who know anything about the Blues. Names like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters have no meaning to them. Yet knowledge of Blues figures such as Johnson and Waters is essential if the history of Southern black people is ever to be fully explored. Although W. C. Handy is called the “Father of the Blues,” this music existed long before Handy penned his first Blues score in 1911. The Blues began as a secular counterpoint to the Southern Spirituals and the Gospels. Sometimes referred to as the Devil’s music because its edifice of choice was the infamous Juke Joint where whiskey mixed--many times violently--with hard living men and women. This music may be viewed as the lyrical response to all that black people faced in their everyday lives in the Southland. The love and pain, union and separation, wretchedness and joy are all themes explored by the Blues.
PBS’s I Can’t Be Satisfied is a magnificent rendering of the life of Muddy Waters, perhaps the second most important figure in Blues history. Only the legendary Robert Johnson has made a greater impact than Muddy has on the music. Muddy Waters was born April 4, 1935 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. His mother died when he was just three years old. Muddy’s grandmother raised him and also gave him his famous nickname His given name was McKinley Morganfield. It was Muddy’s grandmother who moved him two hundred miles north from Rolling Fork to Clarksdale, Mississippi.
I Can’t Be Satisfied begins where all blues begins -- in the Delta where Muddy grew up. But this PBS documentary deftly draws the viewer into the Blues world. At the center of this world is the Blues genius Muddy Waters. What I like about this documentary is that it never forgets that it’s all about a Man and his Blues. Friends, relatives, band members, and lovers all have something to say about Muddy. And, even Muddy, himself, speaks passionately about his life and music. But all these things take a back seat to Muddy’s Blues.
Much has been made about Muddy playing an amplified guitar and using amplified instruments in his band. But none of this would have made a difference if Muddy hadn’t been one hell of a musician. And everyone in this documentary makes it clear that when Muddy played or sang something special, even mythic, was going on. After all, it was Muddy’s earthy music, not Austin Powers, who taught us what Mojo was. And, it was Muddy who sang the national anthem for all black men. Yeah, Muddy spelled it all out for us when he said he was a Mmmaannn!
Nowhere is Muddy’s mastery of the music as evident as when he sings about a love affair between an older man and his “nineteen years old" lover. It is this song that sets up a segment of the documentary that explores Muddy Waters love and family life. What is made clear in this segment is that Muddy loved “beautiful” young women. And Muddy was not one to let marriage get in the way when it came to his pursuing what he loved. To some this segment may paint an unpleasant picture of a black man. But Muddy was what he was. And there is no doubt that he would have never wanted anyone to apologize for the life that he lived.
Like other documentaries about black artists, I Can’t Be Satisfied tells of Muddy’s exploitation by the owner of the legendary Chess Record Company. There is also a segment about what happened to the Blues when R&B came along. But while other black artists were broken by the dirty dealings of their record companies and changes in popular musical taste, Muddy found a way to thrive under these conditions. And, again, this would have never been possible if the music he made wasn’t good. Chuck D, a respected member of the Hip Hop generation, fully recognized the power of Muddy’s music. Speaking of the greatly criticized album, Electric Mud, Chuck D says that the electric element was not driving the music. In other words, Muddy brought the Blues to the band, not the other way around. It was Muddy’s Blues-filled vocals, Chuck D declared, that made the album a significant addition to Blues History.
The documentary ends with Muddy’s death in Illinois on April 30, 1983. Still, this documentary does everything and more to make the life of Muddy Waters a Blues testament well worth seeing. I highly recommend this documentary to novices and hard core fans of the Blues and the legendary Muddy Waters.
* * * * *
Muddy Waters
(1915-1983)
A Bio Chronology
Muddy Waters (14 April 1915-30 April 1983), born McKinley A. Morganfield, was a sharecropping Mississippi bluesman, who became the premier bluesman and bandleader among Chicago numerous blues singers and wailers. He was The Man among many blues artists who strove to become immortals. He had staying power and outlasted the lot of his generation in years and drawing power and influence. B.B. King may have indeed been a 'king," but surely Muddy was the Emperor, the King of Kings.
1915 (14 April) -- Born in a small enclave in Issaquena County, Mississippi known as Jug's Corner, the nearest town on the map a small place called Rolling Fork that was on the train tracks. His mother died when he was about two years old
1918 -- His grandmother moved north to the Stovall Plantation outside of Clarksdale before Muddy was three years old. He stayed there, for the most part, until he was thirty years old. The area, near the Mississippi River, was wet, and his grandmother nicknamed him because of the mud puddles in which he played.
1920 -- Muddy started playing harmonica, an old accordion, and a jew's harp.
1930 -- Bought his first guitar. Later, the Son Sims Four, enlisted him as a vocalist. Muddy saw and was inspired by the playing of Son House whose style he learned. Still later Muddy bought a 1934 V8 Ford.
1941 -- Meets John Work III ( Fisk U.) and Alan Lomax (Library of Congress), who were looking for someone in the style of Robert Johnson, and records in his house for the Library of Congress --"Can't Be Satisfied" and "Feel Like Going Home."
1942 (July) -- The Fisk-Library of Congress return and records Muddy for several more sides for them, some alone and some with the Son Sims group.
1943 (summer) -- Goes to Chicago, after a fight with the plantation overseer. Muddy's uncle, who preceded him to Chicago, gave him an electric guitar soon after he arrived. Incorporates thumbpicks into his style to further increase the volume. Band he assembled established the electric blues sound.
1944 -- Playing house parties his reputation grows quickly and begins to meet established musicians like Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Tampa Red.
1946 -- Cuts "Mean Red Spider," for J. Mayo Williams, an African-American independent producer and three tracks for Columbia, and remained unreleased for decades.
1948 -- His next session was for Aristocrat Records, owned in part by Leonard Chess, and records "Can't Be Satisfied" and "Feel Like Going Home," release as a single 78 rpm with a new urban feeling --with the electric guitar and without the piano. The single sold out its first weekend and Muddy Waters had his first taste of stardom. As early as 1946, Muddy had met Jimmy Rogers (guitarist) and Little Walter (harmonica player). The trio developed the urban blues sound and became popular in the clubs, calling themselves the Headhunters. They enlisted Baby Face Leroy Foster (drums).
1949 -- Muddy returned south triumphant, with their own show on KFFA; for many in the Delta, it was the first time they had heard or saw an electric guitar. Builds his reputation with songs like "Train Fare Home" and "Screamin' and Cryin'."
1950 -- Records with Chess "Rollin' Stone," a song about power, rootless and ruthless independence. The Rolling Stones chose their name from this recording. Muddy's sound was one of exuberant celebration, sexual conquest, and victory over depression.
1951 -- Band round out with Elgin Evans replacing Foster on drums, and by the addition of Otis Spann on piano. With Otis Spann on board, the modern blues band format and sound was fully settled.
1953 -- The whole band records on Chess.
1954 -- Records "I'm Ready."
1955 -- Chuck Berry arrives in Chicago and Muddy advises him to record with Chess. The "Maybellene" release, Chuck Berry's success, and the new rock and roll sound, diminishes the popularity of the blues.
1956 -- Records "Just To Be With You."
1951 - 1956 -- Muddy had fourteen songs on the national charts, including "Still A Fool," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Just Make Love To Me," "I'm Ready," and "Mannish Boy." From the middle 1950s Waters' songwriting became almost wholly urban in character, as for example "She's Nineteen Years Old," "Walkin' Thru The Park," "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had" and the anthemic "Got My Mojo Working," among others. In the late 1950s the national tours grew scarce for Muddy and he stayed on in Chicago.
1958 -- Muddy accepted an invitation to perform in England. The British kids were heavily influenced by Muddy's sound and style and many soon bought electric guitars and amps. Muddy returned two more times to England in the early 1960s, solidifying his role as an instigator of the British Invasion
1960 -- Performs at the Newport Jazz Festival. The budding love generation responded to his rock and rolling versions of "Got My Mojo Working" and "I Feel So Good," and Muddy had a new audience. The 1960s was marked by experimentation and manipulation, which included the recording of Electric Mud.
1969 -- Sudden death of Leonard Chess. Records The Woodstock Album with members of the Band, produced by Band drummer Levon Helm on the new Chess (now owned by a corporation)..
1975 -- Muddy terminates the nearly thirty-year relationship with Chess.
1976 -- Records Hard Again, which won a Grammy, with blues/rock star Johnny Winter as producer. This comeback led to Muddy opening concerts for Eric Clapton and jamming with the Rolling Stones. Later, Muddy records three more albums, the next two also winning Grammy awards. Settles a lawsuit with Arc Music, his publishing company, allowing him to live his final years in financial comfort.
1983 (30 April) -- Dies quietly in his sleep in his home in suburban Westmont Illinois.
* * * * *
In Chicago, a stretch of 43rd Street was renamed Muddy Waters Drive. In 1987 Muddy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1992 was given the Record Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award
A guitar has been made from a plank off his Stovall cabin, and the cabin itself has been dismantled, sent on a tour, and then placed in the Clarksdale Blues Museum.
Many of Muddy's band members had successful solo careers -- Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter became stars in the 1950s. Later, Otis Spann, James Cotton, Paul Oscher, Luther "Georgia Boy" "(Creepin') Snake" Johnson, Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson, Jerry Portnoy, Bob Margolin, and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, among others, enjoyed careers of their own.
Reviews
A Tribute to Muddy Waters: King of the Blues
I know for a fact that there would not be rock & roll in America ... without Muddy Waters." Truer words are seldom spoken--but it's blues musicians who turn out to pay tribute to the Master on this album, whether they're old-timers like Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor, or relative newcomers like Mem Shannon or Waters's own son, Bill Morganfield. Generally speaking, tribute albums are destined to fall short, because no matter how good a musician is, he's not going to play the song exactly like the original, nor should he try to. But as far as honoring the blues giant, A Tribute to Muddy Waters lives up to its name. Keb' Mo's take on "I Can't Be Satisfied" comes awfully close to Waters's, while Guy's "She's Nineteen Years Old" and Taylor's "Long Distance Call" are just as good as one would expect from these two Chicago greats. Shannon adapts "Gypsy Woman" to his own New Orleans style, and the late Robert Lockwood Jr. provides a laid-back, easy version of "Mean Red Spider." An important highlight is Morganfield's "Hoochie Coochie Man"; at times, the son of Muddy Waters sounds so much like his father, it's eerie. Overall it's a fitting honorarium to a man without whom the blues as we hear it today would not exist.—Genevieve Williams
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Album Reviews
King of Chicago Blues
I loved the "Proper Introduction to Muddy Waters" but this is even better. Four disks worth from the 1941 recordings through "Trouble No More" in excellent sound. Best takes, too. It's basically like the Chess anniversary set (1947-52) that came out a few years ago, only now including the great recordings from 1953-55. Discs 3 and 4 are just one masterpiece after the next, right up there with Armstrong or Monroe or name-your-greatest 20th century set. The songs you haven't heard are as good as the more typically anthologized. And it's cheap!—G. Wallace
* * * * *
Electric Mud
This is the infamous "somebody-put-something-in-the-Waters" LP from 1968. A relative hit for Chess, it features the exalted bluesman bellowing over psychedelicized arrangements that owe more to Steppenwolf than Willie Dixon. Waters himself complained that the drums were too busy and the lead guitar sounded like a cat's meow. Not a bad critique.—Steven Stolder
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At Newport
This is the concert that inspired the likes of Eric Burdon, Clapton, Winwood, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page...this is a must for blues and rock n' roll collectors. The sound is live, probably Muddy's best live recording. I would like to find the video/35mm film to this. I also recommend "Hard Again" by Muddy with the help of James Cotton (who is also on this live recording) and Johnny Winter. The man is missed.—"music man"
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The Muddy Waters Story
A newly researched complete audio-biography of Muddy Waters. A deluxe 4-CD set comprising a double CD of audio-biography and two CDs of original musical rarities. Presented in a luxury collectable full-colour slipcase with two illustrated eight-page booklets.
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Can't Get No Grindin'
Short & sweet, fat & raw, all the elements of the Blues at it's best. This is Muddy Waters as he saw himself..a Blues legend at center stage & why not. I have this on vinyl & cd. Buy it, play it. Now ain't that a man!—R.L. Varner
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DVDs of Muddy Waters Performances
In Concert 1971 / Classic Concerts / Can't Be Satisfied / Live at the Chicago Blues Festival / Got My Mojo Working
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Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Chuck Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music. . . . After his release in 1963, Berry had several more hits, including "No Particular Place to Go", "You Never Can Tell", and "Nadine", but these did not achieve the same success, or lasting impact, of his 1950s songs, and by the 1970s he was more in demand as a nostalgic live performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of variable quality. His insistence on being paid cash led to a jail sentence in 1979—four months and community service for tax evasion. . . .
Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986, with the comment that he "laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance." . . . The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll included three of Chuck Berry's songs: "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybellene," and "Rock and Roll Music."—Wikipedia
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Muddy-Waters
Muddy Waters
American musician
Also known as
McKinley Morganfield
born
April 4, 1913
near Rolling Fork, Mississippi
died
April 30, 1983
Westmont, Illinois
Muddy Waters, (aka McKinley Morganfield); born April 4, 1913, near Rolling Fork, Mississippi, U.S.—died April 30, 1983, Westmont, Illinois), dynamic American blues guitarist and singer who played a major role in creating the post-World War II electric blues.
Waters, whose nickname came from his proclivity for playing in a creek as a boy, grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised principally by his grandmother on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He taught himself to play harmonica as a child and took up guitar at age 17. He eagerly absorbed the classic Delta blues styles of Robert Johnson, Son House, and others while developing a style of his own. As a young man, he drove a tractor on the sharecropped plantation, and on weekends he operated the cabin in which he lived as a “juke house,” where visitors could party and imbibe moonshine whiskey made by Waters. He performed both on his own and in a band, occasionally earning a little money playing at house parties. He was first recorded in 1941, for the U.S. Library of Congress by archivist Alan Lomax, who had come to Mississippi in search of Johnson (who had already died by that time).
In 1943 Waters—like millions of other African Americans in the South who moved to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration from 1916 to 1970—relocated to Chicago. There he began playing clubs and bars on the city’s South and West sides while earning a living working in a paper mill and later driving a truck. In 1944 he bought his first electric guitar, which cut more easily through the noise of crowded bars. He soon broke with country blues by playing electric guitar in a shimmering slide style. In 1946 pianist Sunnyland Slim, another Delta native, helped Waters land a contract with Aristocrat Records, for which he made several unremarkable recordings. By 1948 Aristocrat had become Chess Records (taking its name from Leonard and Phil Chess, the Polish immigrant brothers who owned and operated it), and Waters was recording a string of hits for it that began with “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” His early, aggressive, electrically amplified band—including pianist Otis Spann, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and harmonica virtuoso Little Walter—created closely integrated support for his passionate singing, which featured dramatic shouts, swoops, and falsetto moans. His repertoire, much of which he composed, included lyrics that were mournful (“Blow Wind Blow,” “Trouble No More”), boastful (“Got My Mojo Working,” “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”), and frankly sensual (the unusual 15-bar blues “Rock Me”). In the process Waters became the foremost exponent of modern Chicago blues.
Tours of clubs in the South and Midwest in the 1940s and ’50s gave way after 1958 to concert tours of the United States and Europe, including frequent dates at jazz, folk, and blues festivals. Over the years, some of Chicago’s premier blues musicians did stints in Waters’s band, including harmonica players James Cotton and Junior Wells, as well as guitarist Buddy Guy. Toward the end of his career, Waters concentrated on singing and played guitar only occasionally. A major influence on a variety of rock musicians—most notably the Rolling Stones (who took their name from his song “Rollin’ Stone” and made a pilgrimage to Chess to record)—Waters was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
THE MUSIC OF MUDDY WARS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. WATERS:
Muddy Waters - Best Of Muddy Waters - Vintage Delta Blues
Find the album here:
http://bit.ly/1h1A93y http://bit.ly/1k1dAik http://bit.ly/1MTnYno http://bit.ly/1Sb8SjP http://amzn.to/1hdYAdA http://amzn.to/1pdze3S
00:00 - Rock Me
03:12 - Hoochie Coochie Man
06:05 - Trouble No More
08:46 - Got My Mojo Workin'
11:37 - I Won't Go On
14:33 - She's 19 Years Old
17:53 - She's So Pretty
20:06 - I Want to Be Loved
22:50 - Close to You
25:58 - Sugar Sweet
28:29 - I Just Want to Make Love to You
31:23 - I'm Ready
34:28 - You Got to take Sick and Die Some of These Days
36:38 - Long Distance Call
39:19 - I Don't Know Why
42:14 - Mannish Boy
45:09 - Walkin' Through the Park
47:54 - Look What You've Done
50:18 - Diamonds At Your Feet
52:44 - All Aboard
55:41 - Forty Days and Forty Nights
58:34 - I've Got to Love Somebody
01:01:30 - Florida Hurricane
01:04:26 - So Nice and Kind
01:07:30 - Rollin' Stone
01:10:37 - Country Blues
01:14:04 - I Be's Troubled
01:17:11 - Hey Hey
01:19:55 - Meanest Woman
01:22:14 - I Got My Brand On You
01:24:36 - Soon Forgotten
01:27:16 - Tiger In Your Tank
01:29:31 - Southbound Train
01:32:24 - Double Trouble
01:35:12 - Lonesome Road Blues
Muddy Waters - "Hoochie Coochie Man" (1970)
Muddy Waters performing "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "She's Nineteen Years Old", with Buddy Guy and Paul Oscher, from the movie Chicago Blues, in 1970.
Muddy Waters - Live Dortmund, Germany 10/29/1976:
01. Intro & After Hours
02. Soon Forgotten
03. Howlin' Wolf Blues
04. Hoochie Coochie Man
05 Blow Wind Blow
06 Can't Get No Grindin'
07 Long Distance Call
08 Got My Mojo Workin'
09 Got My Mojo Workin' (First Encore)
10 Theme
11 Got My Mojo Workin' (Second Encore)
Muddy Waters: Vocals, Guitar
Luther Johnson: Guitar
Bob Margolin: Guitar
Jerry Portnoy: Harmonica
Pinetop Perkins:
Piano Calvin Jones:
Bass Willie Smith: Drums
guest: Junior Wells: Vocals, Harmonica
Muddy Waters Plus BB King - Montreal - Full Version:
Reposted
so can be seen as a whole rather than in parts as before due to length
restrictions. This version includes all the BB King footagel on
previous released video the last song was left out. No details were given in the
credits or by the presenter when and where this was filmed and I
believed this at first to be from French TV but it turns out that this
was filmed at Montreal University 1980 for Spectel Video directed by
Jacques Méthé
Muddy Waters: The Living Legends of Blues
Muddy Waters
Copenhagen Jazz festival (October 27,1968):
Muddy Waters - Poland 1976:
Muddy Waters - vocals,guitar
Jerry Portnoy - harmonica
Bob Margolin - guitar
Luther Johnson - guitar
Pinetop Perkins - piano
Calvin Jones - bass
Willie Smith - drums
TRACKLIST:
Jerry Portnoy - harmonica
Bob Margolin - guitar
Luther Johnson - guitar
Pinetop Perkins - piano
Calvin Jones - bass
Willie Smith - drums
TRACKLIST:
01.Baby Please Don't Go
02.Soon Forgotten
03.Corrina, Corrina
04.(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man
05.(I'm A) Howlin' Wolf
06.Blow Wind Blow
07.Can't Get No Grindin'
08.Kansas City
09.Everything Is Gonna Be Alright
Muddy Waters - Field Recordings 1941 & 1942.
Rádio Rock Indie:
Chicago Blues Documentary (1972):
Documentary
about Chicago Blues and the migrating black community that brought it
there. Made in 1972 the political tensions of the late 60's are still an
all pervasive presence but it makes for an edgy and atmospheric
portrayal of the era and the music.
With Muddy Waters, Johnnie Lewis, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, J.B. Hutto, Junior Wells, Floyd Jones..
Muddy Waters: Plantation Recordings
Muddy Waters: The London Muddy Waters Sessions 1972 Full Album:
In
1972 Muddy Waters went to England to record The London Muddy Waters
Sessions with Rory Gallagher, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech and Mitch
Mitchell
Muddy Waters - Full Concert - 07/29/71
Ash Grove (OFFICIAL):
Setlist:
0:00:00 - Intro / Walking in the Park
0:02:29 - Honey Bee / Interview
0:09:13 - Outside the Ash Grove
0:10:01 - Backstage
0:10:47 - Inside the Ash Grove / Backstage
0:13:29 - Ash Grove Bar / Backstage / Warm-up
0:21:15 - Hoochie Coochie Man
0:25:02 - Blow Wind Blow
0:29:03 - Strange Woman
0:34:33 - Honey Bee
0:38:59 - Walking Thru the Park
0:42:37 - Long Distance Call
0:48:45 - Got My Mojo Working
0:54:57 - Closing Credits / Interview
0:02:29 - Honey Bee / Interview
0:09:13 - Outside the Ash Grove
0:10:01 - Backstage
0:10:47 - Inside the Ash Grove / Backstage
0:13:29 - Ash Grove Bar / Backstage / Warm-up
0:21:15 - Hoochie Coochie Man
0:25:02 - Blow Wind Blow
0:29:03 - Strange Woman
0:34:33 - Honey Bee
0:38:59 - Walking Thru the Park
0:42:37 - Long Distance Call
0:48:45 - Got My Mojo Working
0:54:57 - Closing Credits / Interview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muddy_Waters
Muddy Waters
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Muddy Waters | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Muddy Waters at the opening of Peaches Records & Tapes in Rockville, Maryland (mid-1970s)
|
||||
| Background information | ||||
| Birth name | McKinley Morganfield | |||
| Born | April 4, 1913 Issaquena County, Mississippi, United States | |||
| Died | April 30, 1983 (aged 70) Westmont, Illinois, United States | |||
| Genres | Blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues | |||
| Occupation(s) | Singer, songwriter, guitarist, bandleader | |||
| Instruments | Vocals, guitar, harmonica | |||
| Years active | 1941–1982 | |||
| Labels | Aristocrat, Chess,[1] Testament | |||
| Website | www.muddywaters.com | |||
McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913[2] – April 30, 1983), known by his stage name Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician who is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues".[3]
Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi and by age seventeen was playing the guitar at parties, emulating local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson.[4] He was recorded by Alan Lomax there for the Library of Congress in 1941.[5][6] In 1943, he headed to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician, eventually recording, in 1946, for first Columbia and then Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess.
In the early 1950s, Muddy and his band, Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elgin Evans on drums and Otis Spann on piano, recorded a series of blues classics, some with bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon, including "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "I'm Ready". In 1958, Muddy headed to England, helping to lay the foundations of the subsequent blues boom there, and in 1960 performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, recorded and released as his first live album, At Newport 1960.
Muddy's influence is tremendous, not just on blues and rhythm and blues but on rock 'n' roll, hard rock, folk, jazz, and country; his use of amplification is often cited as the link between Delta blues and rock 'n' roll.[7][8]
Contents
Early life
Although in his later years Muddy usually said that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915, he was most likely born at Jug's Corner in neighboring Issaquena County in 1913.[9] Recent research has uncovered documentation showing that in the 1930s and 1940s, before his rise to fame, he reported his birth year as 1913 on his marriage license, recording notes and musicians' union card. A 1955 interview in the Chicago Defender is the earliest claim of 1915 as his year of birth, which he continued to use in interviews from that point onward. The 1920 census lists him as five years old as of March 6, 1920, suggesting that his birth year may have been 1914. The Social Security Death Index, relying on the Social Security card application submitted after his move to Chicago in the mid-1940s, lists him as being born April 4, 1913. Muddy's gravestone gives his birth year as 1915.Muddy's grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly following his birth. Della gave the boy the nickname "Muddy" at an early age because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek.[10] Muddy later changed it to "Muddy Water" and finally "Muddy Waters".
The shack on Stovall Plantation where Muddy Waters lived in his youth is now at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He started out on harmonica, but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties, emulating two blues artists in particular, Son House and Robert Johnson.[4][page needed]
On November 20, 1932, Muddy married Mabel Berry. Guitarist Robert Nighthawk played at the wedding and the party reportedly got so wild the floor fell in.[11] Mabel left Muddy three years later when Muddy's first child was born; the child's mother was Leola Spain, 16 years old (Leola later used her maiden name, Brown), "married to a man named Steven" and "going with a guy named Tucker". Leola was the only one of his girlfriends with whom Muddy would stay in touch throughout his life; they never married. By the time he finally cut out for Chicago in 1943, there was another Mrs. Morganfield left behind, a girl called Sallie Ann.[12]
Early career
In August[6] of 1941, Alan Lomax went to Stovall, Mississippi on behalf of the Library of Congress to record various country blues musicians. "He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house," Muddy recalled in Rolling Stone, "and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it, I can do it.'"[5] Lomax came back in July 1942 to record Muddy again. Both sessions were eventually released as Down On Stovall's Plantation on the Testament label.[13] The complete recordings were re-issued on CD as Muddy Waters: The Complete Plantation Recordings. The historic 1941–42 Library of Congress field recordings by Chess Records in 1993, and re-mastered in 1997.[14]In 1943, Muddy headed to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and working in a factory by day and performing at night. Big Bill Broonzy, then one of the leading blues-men in Chicago, helped Muddy break into the very competitive market by allowing him to open for his shows in the rowdy clubs.[15] In 1945, Muddy's uncle, Joe Grant, gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds.[16]
In 1946, he recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they were not released at the time. Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess. In 1947, he played guitar with Sunnyland Slim on piano on the cuts "Gypsy Woman" and "Little Anna Mae." These were also shelved, but in 1948, "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home" became big hits and his popularity in clubs began to take off. Soon after, Aristocrat changed their label name to Chess Records and Muddy's signature tune "Rollin' Stone" also became a smash hit.
Commercial success
Initially, the Chess brothers would not allow Muddy to use his working band in the recording studio; instead he was provided with a backing bass by Ernest "Big" Crawford, or by musicians assembled specifically for the recording session, including "Baby Face" Leroy Foster and Johnny Jones. Gradually Chess relented, and by September 1953 he was recording with one of the most acclaimed blues groups in history: Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (a.k.a. Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann on piano. The band recorded a series of blues classics during the early 1950s, some with the help of bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon, including "Hoochie Coochie Man" (Number 8 on the R&B charts), "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (Number 4), and "I'm Ready". These three were "the most macho songs in his repertoire," wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. "Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an image, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence."[citation needed] Along with his former harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs and recent southern transplant Howlin' Wolf, Muddy reigned over the early 1950s Chicago blues scene, his band becoming a proving ground for some of the city's best blues talent. While Little Walter continued a collaborative relationship long after he left Muddy's band in 1952, appearing on most of Muddy's classic recordings throughout the 1950s, Muddy developed a long-running, generally good-natured rivalry with Wolf... The success of Muddy's ensemble paved the way for others in his group to break away and enjoy their own solo careers. In 1952 Little Walter left when his single "Juke" became a hit, and in 1955 Rogers quit to work exclusively with his own band, which had been a sideline until that time. Although he continued working with Muddy's band, Otis Spann enjoyed a solo career and many releases under his own name beginning in the mid-1950s. Around that time, Muddy Waters scored hits with songs "Mannish Boy"[1] and "Sugar Sweet" in 1955, followed by the R&B hits "Trouble No More," "Forty Days & Forty Nights" and "Don't Go No Farther" in 1956.[17]England and low profile
Muddy headed to England in 1958 and shocked audiences (whose only previous exposure to blues had come via the acoustic folk/blues sounds of acts such as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy) with his loud, amplified electric guitar and thunderous beat. His performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, recorded and released as his first live album, At Newport 1960, helped turn on a whole new generation to Muddy's sound.However, for the better part of twenty years (since his last big hit in 1956, "I'm Ready") Muddy was put on the back shelf by the Chess label and recorded albums with various "popular" themes: Brass and the Blues, Electric Mud, etc. In 1967, he joined forces with Bo Diddley, Little Walter and Howlin' Wolf to record the Super Blues and The Super Super Blues Band pair of albums of Chess blues standards. In 1972 he went back to England to record The London Muddy Waters Sessions with Rory Gallagher, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech and Mitch Mitchell — but their playing was not up to his standards. "These boys are top musicians, they can play with me, put the book before 'em and play it, you know," he told Guralnick. "But that ain't what I need to sell my people, it ain't the Muddy Waters sound. An' if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man."
Muddy's sound was basically Delta blues electrified, but his use of microtones, in both his vocals and slide playing, made it extremely difficult to duplicate and follow correctly.[citation needed] "When I play on the stage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play."[18]
Comeback
Muddy Waters with James Cotton, 1971
In 1981, Muddy Waters was invited to perform at ChicagoFest, the city's top outdoor music festival. He was joined onstage by Johnny Winter—who had successfully produced his most recent albums—and played classics like "Mannish Boy," "Trouble No More" and "Mojo Working" to a new generation of fans. This historic performance was made available on DVD in 2009 by Shout! Factory. Later that year, he performed live with the Rolling Stones at the Checkerboard Lounge, with a DVD version of the concert released in 2012.[21]
In 1982, declining health dramatically curtailed Muddy's performance schedule. His last public performance took place when he sat in with Eric Clapton's band at a Clapton concert in Florida in autumn of 1982.[22]
Death
On April 30, 1983, Muddy Waters died in his sleep from heart failure, at his home in Westmont, Illinois. At his funeral at Restvale Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, throngs of blues musicians and fans showed up to pay tribute to one of the true originals of the art form. "Muddy was a master of just the right notes," John P. Hammond, told Guitar World magazine. "It was profound guitar playing, deep and simple... more country blues transposed to the electric guitar, the kind of playing that enhanced the lyrics, gave profundity to the words themselves." Two years after his death, Chicago honored him by designating the one-block section between 900 and 1000 E. 43rd Street near his former home on the south side "Honorary Muddy Waters Drive".[23] The Chicago suburb of Westmont, where Muddy lived the last decade of his life, named a section of Cass Avenue near his home "Honorary Muddy Waters Way".[24] Following his death, fellow blues musician B.B. King told Guitar World, "It's going to be years and years before most people realize how greatly he contributed to American music". A Mississippi Blues Trail marker has been placed in Clarksdale, Mississippi, by the Mississippi Blues Commission designating the site of Muddy Waters' cabin.[25]Influence
His influence is tremendous, over a variety of music genres: blues, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, hard rock, folk, jazz, and country. He also helped Chuck Berry get his first record contract.His 1958 tour of England marked possibly the first time amplified, modern urban blues was heard there, although on his first tour he was the only one amplified. His backing was provided by Englishman Chris Barber's trad jazz group.
His use of amplification is cited as "the technological missing link between Delta Blues and Rock 'N' Roll."[7] This is underlined in a 1968 article in Rolling Stone magazine: “There was a difference between Muddy’s instrumental work and that of House and Johnson, however, and the crucial difference was the result of Waters’ use of the electric guitar on his Aristocrat sides; he had taken up the instrument shortly after moving to Chicago in 1943.”[8]
The Rolling Stones named themselves after his 1950 song "Rollin' Stone" (also known as "Catfish Blues", which Jimi Hendrix covered as well). The magazine Rolling Stone also took its name from the same song. Hendrix recalled "the first guitar player I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I first heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death". Cream covered "Rollin' and Tumblin'" on their 1966 debut album Fresh Cream, as Eric Clapton was a big fan of Muddy Waters when he was growing up, and his music influenced Clapton's music career. The song was also covered by Canned Heat at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival and later adapted by Bob Dylan on the album Modern Times. One of Led Zeppelin's biggest hits, "Whole Lotta Love", is lyrically based upon the Muddy Waters hit "You Need Love", written by Willie Dixon. Dixon wrote some of Muddy Waters' most famous songs, including "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (a big radio hit for Etta James, as well as the 1970s rock band Foghat), "Hoochie Coochie Man", which The Allman Brothers Band famously covered (the song was also covered by Humble Pie and Steppenwolf), "Trouble No More" and "I'm Ready". In 1993, Paul Rodgers released the album Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters, on which he covered a number of Muddy Waters songs, including "Louisiana Blues", "Rollin' Stone", "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I'm Ready" (among others) in collaboration with a number of famous guitarists including Gary Moore, Brian May and Jeff Beck.
Angus Young of the rock group AC/DC has cited Muddy Waters as one of his influences. The AC/DC song title "You Shook Me All Night Long" came from lyrics of the Muddy Waters song "You Shook Me", written by Willie Dixon and J. B. Lenoir. Earl Hooker first recorded it as an instrumental, which was then overdubbed with vocals by Muddy Waters in 1962. Led Zeppelin also covered it on their debut album.
Muddy Waters' songs have been featured in long-time fan Martin Scorsese's movies, including The Color of Money, Goodfellas and Casino. Muddy Waters' 1970s recording of his mid-'50s hit "Mannish Boy" (a.k.a. "I'm A Man") was used in Goodfellas, Better Off Dead, and the hit film Risky Business, and also features in the rockumentary The Last Waltz.
The song "Come Together" by The Beatles references Muddy Waters: "He roller coaster/he got Muddy Waters."
Van Morrison lyrics include "Muddy Waters singin', "I'm a Rolling Stone" from his 1982 song "Cleaning Windows", on the album Beautiful Vision.
American Stoner Metal band Bongzilla covered Muddy Water's song Champagne and Reefer on their album Amerijuanican.
In 2008, Jeffrey Wright portrayed Muddy in the biopic Cadillac Records, a film about the rise and fall of Chess Records and the lives of its recording artists. A second 2008 film about Leonard Chess and Chess Records, Who Do You Love, also covers Muddy's time at Chess Records.
In the 2009 film The Boat that Rocked (retitled Pirate Radio in the U.S) about pirate radio in the UK, the cryptic message that late-night DJ Bob gives to Carl to give to Carl's mother is: "Muddy Waters Rocks."
In 1990, the television show Doogie Howser, M.D. featured an episode called "Doogie Sings the Blues" with the main character, Blind Otis Lemon, based on Muddy Waters, with references to his influence on the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, along with the performance of "Got My Mojo Working" by Blind Otis Lemon. He is also referred to as the original "Hoochie Coochie Man".
Muddy's son Larry "Mud" Morganfield is a professional blues singer and musician.
Awards and recognition
Grammy Awards
| Muddy Waters Grammy Award History[26] | |||||
| Year | Category | Title | Genre | Label | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | They Call Me Muddy Waters | folk | MCA/Chess | winner |
| 1973 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | The London Muddy Waters Session | folk | MCA/Chess | winner |
| 1975 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album | folk | MCA/Chess | winner |
| 1978 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | Hard Again | folk | Blue Sky | winner |
| 1979 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | I'm Ready | folk | Blue Sky | winner |
| 1980 | Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording | Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live | folk | Blue Sky | winner |
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed four songs of Muddy Waters among the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.[27]| Year Recorded | Title |
|---|---|
| 1950 | Rollin' Stone |
| 1954 | Hoochie Coochie Man |
| 1955 | Mannish Boy |
| 1957 | Got My Mojo Working |
The Blues Foundation Awards
| Muddy Waters: Blues Music Awards[28] | ||||
| Year | Category | Title | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Reissue Album of the Year | The Complete Plantation Recordings | Winner | |
| 1995 | Reissue Album of the Year | One More Mile | Winner | |
| 2000 | Traditional Blues Album of the Year | The Lost Tapes of Muddy Waters | Winner | |
| 2002 | Historical Blues Album of the Year | Fathers and Sons | Winner | |
| 2006 | Historical Album of the Year | Hoochie Coochie Man: Complete Chess Recordings, Volume 2, 1952–1958 | Winner | |
Inductions
| Year Inducted | Title |
|---|---|
| 1980 | Blues Foundation Hall of Fame |
| 1987 | Rock and Roll Hall of Fame |
| 1992 | Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award |
| Year | Stamp | USA | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | 29 cents Commemorative stamp | U.S. Postal Service | Photo[29] |
Discography
Main article: Muddy Waters discography
Studio albums
- Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill Broonzy (1960)
- Folk Singer (1964)
- Brass and the Blues (1966)
- Electric Mud (1968)
- After the Rain (1969)
- Fathers and Sons (1969)
- The London Muddy Waters Sessions (1970)
- Can't Get No Grindin' (1973)
- "Unk" in Funk (1974)
- The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album (1975)
- Hard Again (1977)
- I'm Ready (1978)
- King Bee (1981)
Notes:
- "29 cents Commemorative stamp". Muddy Waters. Retrieved 2009-07-18.
References
- Robert Gordon, Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, 2002, 432 pp. ISBN 0-316-32849-9
- Sandra B. Tooze, Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man, 1997, 383 pp. ISBN 1-55022-296-1
- Muddy Waters, Muddy Waters: Deep Blues, 1995, 183 pp. ISBN 0-7935-0955-6
- Dave Rubin, Muddy Waters, Muddy Waters: Deep Blues and Good News. ISBN 0-7935-6501-4
- James R. Rooney, Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters, 1991, 163 pp. ISBN 0-306-80427-1
- The Great R&B-files – The R&B Pioneers Series
