Muddy Waters

“No I ain’t no millionaire but I had a lot of managers that became millionaires.” – Muddy Waters

Bandleader, songwriter, guitarist, singer, song interpreter and the prime mover of the Chicago electric Blues scene hailed from the Mississippi Delta, like almost all the great electric bluesman of the post war era. He was also a good man who helped many younger or struggling musicians as they later bore witness. But whatever else he was, he will forever be the once and future King of the Chicago Blues.

Born McKinley Morganfield he grew up and worked on the Stovall farm teaching himself the harmonica and later the guitar and from around 1935 he was playing in juke joints and dances in and around the Clarksdale area. In mid summer 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Muddy at Stovall's for the Library of Congress; Muddy sang Country Blues and Burr Clover Country Blues.

In 1943 Muddy, who had got his nickname from his grandmother, because he was always playing in a nearby creek as a child, moved north. He took the train to Chicago’s Illinois Central Station; initially finding work in a paper factory. Muddy began playing for tips on Maxwell Street soon after arriving in the city; Big Bill Broonzy helped the country boy break into the urban scene. Muddy started playing with Eddie Boyd, as well as backing Sonny Boy Williamson No.1 at the Plantation Club. A switch from acoustic to electric guitar in 1944 galvanised Muddy’s career. He continued to play traditional Delta bottleneck, but the electric guitar transformed his sound and helped to ‘invent’ post war Chicago Blues.

In 1948 Muddy cut ‘I Can't Be Satisfied’ and ‘Feel Like Going Home’, which Leonard Chess released on the Checker label. ‘Feel Like Going Home’ was a reworking of Son House’s ‘Walking Blues’. Muddy had huge respect for House and this is another song Muddy must have sung countless times before this recording. The record sold out in a day, going on to make No.11 on the R&B charts in September 1948. Chess was anxious not to upset a winning formula and despite the fact that Muddy had his own band he continued to record Muddy as a duo, or with Leroy Foster on guitar.

By the late 1940s his band included Leroy Foster on guitar or drums, Big Crawford on bass, Jimmy Rogers on guitar and harmonica and not long afterwards Little Walter Jacobs was added as the featured harmonica player. Muddy was only in his early 30s but he became the patriarch of the Chicago blues scene. With the pick of the city’s musicians in the 1950s, it was more a question of who didn’t play in Muddy Waters Band than who did. The Muddy Waters Blues Band was recording as an entity by 1951, the epitome of the hard-edged, driving electric Blues band of Chicago, a cornerstone of what we call rock music today.

In 1951 ‘Louisiana Blue’s became the second in his run of sixteen chart hits, which included classics like, ‘I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘Just Make Love to Me’, ‘Mannish Boy’,  ‘Forty Days and Nights’ and ‘They Call Me Muddy Waters’, in which he sings “I’m the most bluest man in this whole Chicago town”…..few would disagree.

In 1959 Muddy released Muddy Sings Big Bill, a tribute album to his former mentor who had died a year earlier. The following year at the Newport Festival Muddy performed the song, predominantly to a White audience, and it was captured for his album Muddy Waters at Newport; one of the great live albums and a favourite of many blues’ fans. As the band powers through the song the crowd can be heard responding to their brilliance with spontaneous shouts. Just listen to how he puts power into ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Workin’.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Muddy’s band was the city’s premier recording outfit, a veritable academy of the Blues. Among those who played with Muddy were guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Luther Tucker, and Earl Hooker; harmonica players Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton and James Cotton, Willie Dixon on bass; pianists Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, and Pinetop Perkins along with drummer Fred Below.  Another was Buddy Guy who played on Muddy’s wonderful 1964  album, Muddy Waters Folk Singer.

Muddy like many of his contemporaries toured Britain and Europe in the 1960s as part of the American Folk Blues Festivals; his reception was better than when he had previously visited the UK at the invitation of Chris Barber in 1958, the jazz trombonist. Many people in the jazz fraternity, who were the keepers of the blues flame in fifties Britain, decided it was a travesty for Muddy to play with amplification. Somehow these blues zealots decided that the only pure blues was acoustic – thank goodness ideas changed.

In May 1964 Otis Spann cut a single at Decca studios in London with producer Mike Vernon. On ‘Pretty Girls Everywhere’ and ‘Stirs Me Up’ Otis was accompanied by Muddy Waters on rhythm guitar and Eric Clapton on lead. Some years later Eric recalled "they were both very friendly, and they had beautiful shiny silk suits, with big trousers!"

As the Blues languished somewhat in the late 60s, then so did Muddy’s career. In the 1970s he collaborated with Johnny Winter, Muddy’s career took an upturn with the release of the album Hard Again in 1977, winning him a Grammy. A second album, I'm Ready, was followed by a tour of the U.S. including a performance at the White House for Pres­ident Jimmy Carter.

Muddy passed away in his sleep aged sixty-eight in 1983. His influence as well as the respect that he commanded among the Rock community was acknowledged when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

 “He was such a sweet man, people like that shouldn’t ever have to die.” – Buddy Guy