Muddy Waters

His mother died soon after he was born and his grandmother Della Grant raised him on Stovall Plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. She called him Muddy because he played in Deer Creek. Waters came later, when he started working local jobs on harmonica in his early teens. He sang in a Baptist church and said afterward that all his moaning and trembling came straight out of it. At about 17 he sold the family's last horse for roughly 15 dollars, handed his grandmother seven-fifty, kept seven-fifty, and paid two and a half for a Stella guitar out of the Sears catalogue. He copied Son House and Robert Johnson. In the early 1930s he toured the Delta behind Big Joe Williams, who dropped him for taking the women in the crowd.

Alan Lomax recorded him at Stovall for the Library of Congress in August 1941 and came back in July 1942. What mattered was the playback: he said the voice coming out of the machine sounded just like anybody's records, and it was his own. He went to Chicago in 1943 — the single most momentous event in his life, he called it — drove a truck and worked a factory by day, opened for Big Bill Broonzy at night, and in 1944 bought an amplifier because nobody could hear an acoustic in a club. Almost everything that came after sits on that purchase. I Can't Be Satisfied was a hit in 1948. By September 1953 Chess let him record with his own band, and out came Hoochie Coochie Man, I'm Ready and I Just Want to Make Love to You.

The songs that fixed him in the culture were not his. Willie Dixon wrote all three of those hits, the ones a listener would name first if asked what Muddy Waters sounded like. The label kept steering him, too. In 1963 Chess stripped out the electric guitar and made him an acoustic record for the folk audience. In 1968 Marshall Chess wrapped him in a psychedelic band for Electric Mud, which charted at 127 and which Waters afterward called dogshit that started coming back in returns. Handed a set of British rock musicians in 1972 he was polite and unmoved: they could put the book in front of them and play it, he said, but it was not the Muddy Waters sound, and his blues was the hardest in the world to play.

He died in his sleep at his house in Westmont, Illinois, on April 30, 1983, at 70, of heart failure with cancer, and was buried beside his wife Geneva at Restvale Cemetery in Alsip. Then the lawyers arrived. His heirs and his manager Scott Cameron fought over the copyrights for decades; the last hearing was in July 2018 and by 2023 nothing had been resolved. The name did better than the estate. The Rolling Stones took theirs from a 1950 side of his. Chicago renamed a block of East 43rd Street for him, and in 2017 put his face ten stories high on a wall at State and Washington.

Muddy Waters's life against the full span of the corpus.

• I Can't Be Satisfied song
  His first hit for Aristocrat, cut with a bass player and a slide 1948
• Rollin' Stone song
  A British band and a magazine both took their names from it 1950
• Hoochie Coochie Man song
  Written by Willie Dixon, and the sound most people mean by Muddy Waters 1954
• At Newport 1960 album
  One of the first live blues albums ever released 1960
• Folk Singer album
  Chess took the electricity away for the folk market. It sold badly and aged well 1964
• Hard Again album
  The Johnny Winter comeback record, and a Grammy 1977

• April 4, 1913 aged 0 Born McKinley Morganfield in Issaquena County, Mississippi He always said 1915, at Rolling Fork, and the gravestone agrees with him.
• c. 1930 aged ~17 Sells the family's last horse and buys a Stella guitar for two dollars fifty
• August 1941 aged 28 Alan Lomax records him at Stovall for the Library of Congress Hearing the playback, he said, was when he knew.
• 1943 aged ~30 Moves to Chicago Truck driving and factory work by day, clubs at night.
• 1948 aged ~35 I Can't Be Satisfied and I Feel Like Going Home become hits
• 1958 aged ~45 Tours England and is too loud for it The morning papers ran the headline Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano.
• 1968 aged ~55 Electric Mud is released and he disowns it
• November 22, 1981 aged 68 Plays the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago with three Rolling Stones
• April 30, 1983 aged 70 Dies in his sleep at Westmont, Illinois Heart failure with cancer. He was 70.

• Robert Johnson 1911–1938
  Delta blues guitarist whose small recorded output influenced generations of blues and rock players. copied him first
• Chuck Berry 1926–2017
  Guitarist and songwriter whose music established core sounds, themes, and performance styles of rock and roll. labelmate at Chess
• B.B. King 1925–2015
  Singer and guitarist whose expressive style brought electric blues to a worldwide audience and influenced generations of musicians. took the same music the other way
• Jimi Hendrix 1942–1970
  Guitarist whose sound, technique, and performance style revolutionized rock music. said hearing him scared him to death
• Bob Dylan b. 1941
  Songwriter whose poetic lyrics transformed folk, rock, and the role of popular music in public life. recorded his songs
• Elvis Presley 1935–1977
  The King of Rock and Roll whose music and style revolutionized American popular culture. sold the Delta to the same white audience