A Brief History of the Blues #4:Muddy Waters

"I'm your hoochie coochie man…"


Blues grandmaster and unintended patriarch of rock and roll. He was a giant man of talent who recognized opportunity and was not shy about taking a chance. Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morganfield in Jug Fork, Mississippi on April 4th, 1913) was responsible for moving the blues from its primarily acoustic Delta tradition to its electric heyday of the late forties and early fifties extending into today. When Muddy moved to Chicago, he brought tradition, skill and a huge, leather bellows fueled voice with him and music has never been the same.

But we're a little ahead of our story.

Raised by his grandmother after his mother died when he was a toddler, they moved to a one-room cabin on the outskirts of Stovall's plantation around 1916. He picked up his nickname from his grandmother due to his fondness for playing in mud puddles as a child. Like so many of the blues greats, Muddy started out playing on the harmonica when he was a child. Infected with a love of music, he was found to have in preternatural beat and rhythm, pounding on empty cans, plucking on a jews harp and an accordion around the house, graduating to a $2.50 Stella guitar that he purchased around 1930.

Even as a teenager, Muddy had a deep and powerful voice and was enlisted by a local string band known as The Son Sims Four as a vocalist. He was given some basic guitar instruction by Sims but it was seeing Son House play slide guitar that lit the fuse in Muddy. To his dying day, Muddy claimed to have mastered the slide guitar style in a matter of a year.

Life on the plantation was one of bare subsistence and Muddy like so many others did what he had to do to make a little extra cash; from playing for tips and hosting house parties to running a still, collecting bottles for a local bootlegger, to trapping furs to driving folks to and from town in a 1934 Ford V-8 that he had purchased, he scratched to get by.

In August 1941, Alan Lomax, a white man and John Work, an African American, field archivists for the Library of Congress, arrived in Coahoma County looking for musicians to record. They had been sent specifically to look for someone who could play "in the style of Robert Johnson", having missed Johnson years earlier by a few months not knowing of his death. Everyone they talked to pointed them in the direction of Muddy. Waters heard that "a white man" was looking for him. Fearing that he was a "revenuer" come to bust him for his still and his homemade whiskey, Waters opted to head him off at the pass and meet him at the county store. Apprehensive, it took a while for Muddy to trust the men but Lomax gained his trust first, dragging a Martin guitar and a bottle from his car. Swapping both back and forth, Muddy finally relented enough to allow them to talk him into recording a few songs for them. Word spread quickly and Muddy's band mate, Son Sims raced to the store with his guitar as well and they set about making two records on that porch that would later launch Muddy's life long career.

"Country Blues" (later named "I feel like going home") and "I be's troubled" (later named "I can't be satisfied") were recorded using a portable acetate recording device which cut the recordings directly onto glass plates (metals were being rationed for the war effort). When Lomax played the recordings back for Muddy is quoted as having thought, "Hey, I sounded just like anybody else's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. I thought, 'Man, I can sing.'" Lomax later sent two copies of the recording to Muddy who raced to the local juke house, placed both on the machine and played them over and over. Smiling, Waters said to no one in particular "I can do it! I can do it!"

Subsequent trips to the Delta netted Lomax several additional recordings of Muddy Waters playing a stinging bottleneck slide on an acoustic guitar but afterward, essentially disappeared from Muddy's life. Over the next few years, Waters continued to hone his skills and enhance his reputation as a musician in and around the Clarksdale area. In 1943, after an argument with the plantation over-seer for asking for a raise, Muddy left the Delta for Chicago.

He had friends and family in Chicago and due to the war, work was plentiful. Muddy found a factory job the day of his arrival. He briefly moved in with family on Chicago's South Side and began playing rent parties and meeting up with some of the most established blues musicians in the area at the time. Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and Memphis Slim took an interest in Muddy and helped him land bar gigs at night that he played while holding down his full time job during the day. The switch to electric guitar was a matter of practicality. It didn't take Muddy long to realize that his acoustic guitar simply didn't have the power to play over the loud and raucous bar crowds. Muddy quickly incorporated his driving bass lines from his acoustic to the electric by using thumb picks, which was a radical departure for the blues scene in Chicago at the time.

Although Muddy recorded a few tracks between 1943 and 1948, some actually released with another musicians name on the label, his first big break came through the Artistocrat label (owned in part by Leonard Chess who later formed one of the most influential blues labels in history – Chess Records) in 1948. He recorded a few sides with a piano accompaniment under Leonard's direction that were considered rather lackluster. At the end of the third session, Muddy asked Leonard if he could record one 'his way' which meant just Muddy and his guitar. Leonard gave him the okay and Muddy reworked "Feel like going home" and "I can't be satisfied" (the very songs that he had recorded to Lomax years before but this time electric and citified).

The records first pressing was released on a Friday and was almost completely sold out by Saturday. "You couldn't get one in Chicago nowhere," said Waters. "The people were buying them two or three at a time. They started a limit, one to a customer". The story was that Muddy went into the Maxwell Street Radio Company to buy a few copies and even after telling the man at the counter that "I'm the man who made that," he still was only allowed to buy one copy. He later sent his wife out to buy another copy.

About a month after his records release, Muddy was riding home from a gig and he claims he could hear that record playing up and down the block. "All of a sudden," Muddy said, "I became Muddy Waters. Just overnight". After years of playing, Muddy was an overnight sensation.

There are many, many more things that can be said about Muddy Waters. His sphere of influence is still being felt. His songs are covered and re-covered. His compilations continue to sell well. It's difficult to find a guitar God from the sixties and seventies that does not note Muddy Waters as being an influence. Everyone from Eric Clapton to Billy Gibbons to Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page reverently give a nod in Waters direction. Stevie Ray Vaughn was enamored with the Muddy Waters records that his brother Jimmy Vaughn played relentlessly in their boyhood home.

Muddy inadvertently helped name The Rolling Stones. Keith Richards tells the story that when speaking to a club owner regarding their upcoming first gig, when asked the name of the band, Richards looked down and saw a Muddy Waters album cover lying on the floor from an afternoon of consistently listening to American blues records. The first track listed was "Rolling Stone". Richards blurted out "We're The Rolling Stones".

To this day, Muddy's music shows up in movie soundtracks.

His original band from the 1950's was an All-Star lineup, several of whom went on to their own legendary solo careers. Notably Jimmie Rodgers, Little Walter, Otis Spann and Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson.

"Steady Rollin'" Bob Margolin and Pinetop Perkins who were members of his last band continue to tour as the Muddy Waters Band.

If they ever carve out a Mount Rushmore for American music giants, Muddy Waters should be sitting right between Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley.

In the forward to "Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters", Keith Richards wrote "This music got called the blues about a hundred years ago, but the music is about a feeling and feelings didn't just start a hundred years ago. Feelings start in the person and I think that's why the blues are universal, because it's a part of everybody. Muddy is like a very comforting arm around the shoulder. You need that, you know? It can be dark down there, man".

Yes sir, we do know.