Muddy Waters

Musician

  • Born: April 4, 1913
  • Birthplace: Jug's Corner, near Rolling Fork, Issaquena County, Mississippi
  • Died: April 30, 1983
  • Place of death: Westmont, Illinois

American musician

Waters ushered traditional American blues music into the modern era as the first significant musician in the genre to effectively incorporate electric guitars, amplification, and technology-driven musical techniques into the art form. With his pioneering recordings in the 1940’s and 1950’s he was a key figure in bringing the folk music of the Mississippi Delta to worldwide mainstream recognition.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Born McKinley Morganfield to a destitute family of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Muddy Waters was no stranger to the hardships epitomized by his memorable songs and emotionally charged singing style. Waters moved in with his maternal grandmother, Della Graves, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, at age three after the untimely death of his mother. Graves nicknamed him Muddy Waters soon thereafter, allegedly because of his childhood passion for playing in the mud that permeated their rural Mississippi home.

Because his grandmother was a day laborer at Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, the brutal and impoverished conditions in which Waters was raised afforded him little opportunity for formal education. However, at age thirteen he took up harmonica, quickly branched out to guitar, and by his early twenties had obtained a formidable mastery of traditional Delta blues music. Heavily influenced by the raw, driving sound of early blues guitarists like Son House and Robert Johnson, Waters soon was able to add to his arsenal the distinctive “bottleneck” slide technique and the throaty, intense vocal delivery style that have become the hallmark of the modern blues sound.

Life’s Work

Folk archivist Alan Lomax travelled to Stovall, Mississippi, in 1941 in search of Delta musicians to record on behalf of the Library of Congress. Searching for Johnson, who, he discovered, had died three years earlier, he met Waters after asking around about other musicians who played in Johnson’s style. Lomax was repeatedly told about Waters, who regularly performed in a tiny local club he ran to make ends meet. Impressed by Waters’s talent, Lomax promptly recorded his renditions of blues standards “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home.” He was so impressed with Waters’s distinctive approach to these numbers that he returned a year later to record more of Waters’s material. The resulting album, Down on Stovall’s Plantation, was released on the Testament label in 1966.

Seeing his notoriety beginning to increase, Waters decided to leave Mississippi in 1943 for Chicago, where he embarked on a career as a professional musician. Things were difficult at first, but with the support of popular Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, who often allowed Waters and his band to open for him, the exciting newcomer was able to garner enough attention on the city’s club scene in the mid-1940’s to earn numerous stage appearances. His energetic live show soon generated record label interest, and Waters had soon recorded sides for both Columbia and Aristocrat. His Columbia recordings were shelved, but Aristocrat released “I Can’t Be Satisfied” (1948) and “I Feel Like Going Home” (1948), which subsequently became big hits for the fledgling label. Aristocrat changed its name to Chess Records in 1948, and shortly thereafter released Waters’s signature hit “Rollin’ Stone” (1950).

The band with which Waters recorded at Chess in the early 1950’s has been widely acknowledged as one the finest combinations in blues history. With Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on rhythm guitar, Elgin Evans on drums, Otis Spann on piano, and Big Crawford on bass, Waters recorded a string of blues masterpieces. Classics like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready,” “Mannish Boy,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin,’” and “Got My Mojo Working,” topped the rhythm and blues charts in the early and mid-1950’s. The songs have become staples of the blues repertoire. Most of Waters’s Chess-era sidemen later went on to successful solo careers. Spann and Rogers in particular are regarded as blues legends, no doubt in part because of the phenomenal recordings with Waters.

Nonetheless, by the late 1950’s, Waters’s popularity in the United States began to wane. Chuck Berry came to Chicago in 1955, and with Waters’s encouragement auditioned for Chess. The sessions that followed, which included the classic cut “Maybellene,” introduced the world to the blues-influenced but highly distinctive sound of rock and roll. Ironically, Berry’s ensuing popularity caused Chess to divert most of its attention from blues to the more profitable recordings of Berry and other emerging rock-and-roll artists. Soon, Waters found himself struggling for bookings and air play.

Scrambling to retain his artistic integrity while remaining commercially viable, Waters traveled to England in 1958 in an attempt to establish an international audience. However, his progressive and highly amplified sound proved difficult for British audiences of the period. Meanwhile, acoustic folk also was growing extremely popular on the American charts, prompting Waters to return to the United States and try his hand at playing the more toned-downed acoustic blues he had learned as a youth in Mississippi. His memorable appearance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, which included several traditional numbers, introduced an entirely new generation and social class of listeners to the unpolished but emotionally direct power of Mississippi Delta blues. White fans in particular, both in the United States and England, quickly developed a fascination with and hunger for Waters’s raw and earthy vocal style and ethereal slide guitar technique not to mention his unabashed male bravado and sexually potent lyrics.

Waters’s unique and poignant combination of traditional blues, modern instrumentation, and sexual candor influenced 1960’s rock and pop artists such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, and the band Led Zeppelin, who incorporated elements of Waters’s approach into their own music. Most electric guitarists who began playing in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s were inspired by Waters. The Rolling Stones, one of rock and roll’s all-time most popular bands, is named for Waters’s classic Chess single.

Waters died in his sleep on April 30, 1983, at the age of sixty-eight. He had been diagnosed with cancer. He died at his home in suburban Westmont, Illinois.

Significance

Although some of Waters’s black fans came to resent the popularity and influence his music generated in the 1960’s with more mainstream audiences, Waters garnered such sweeping recognition and acclaim during this seminal era in popular music that by the 1970’s he had become a formidable musical legend. Despite the disdain expressed by some in his core audience, Waters had by this time earned undisputed status as the king of American blues. He remained a top concert draw and a commercially successful recording artist throughout the last two decades of his life, releasing a number of noteworthy albums throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine, another Waters namesake, placed him seventeen on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

In addition to his recognition by Rolling Stone, Waters has received a number of other important accolades, both in his lifetime and posthumously. His recordings received three Grammy Awards, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. A segment of Chicago’s 43rd Street was renamed Muddy Waters Drive in his honor, acknowledging his indispensable role in making the city the capital of the blues.

Modern performers, such as Bonnie Raitt, Bob Margolin, Susan Tedeschi, and Johnny Lang, continue to champion Waters’s music. His legacy remains omnipresent in not only the blues but also genres as widely varied as country, hard rock, pop, and jazz. Indeed, any modern music that features grittily soulful vocals, forcefully driving rhythms, and innovative sexual imagery owes some debt to the pioneering music of Waters.

Bibliography

Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. New York: Little, Brown, 2002. Perhaps the most extensively researched and annotated biography available on Waters’s life and legacy. Impressively documents the heretofore sketchy details of Waters’s early life. Includes a foreword by Keith Richards and an extensive index.

O’Neal, Jim, and Amy Van Singel, eds. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from “Living Blues” Magazine. New York: Routledge, 2002. Interviews of leading blues musicians, including Muddy Waters, that contextualizes his work in the history of blues music.

Rooney, James. Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters. 1971. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991. Presented in a straightforward question-and-answer format, this work features Waters’s own words about his life, career, and creative process in a uniquely personal way that many other works about him lack. Rooney also draws unexpected and insightful parallels between the urban blues of Waters and the high lonesome sound of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe.

Tooze, Sandra B. Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man. Toronto, Ont.: ECW Press, 1997. Focuses primarily on anecdotes from Waters and those who knew him. This biography may be too lavish in its praise and near deification of Waters for some readers, but it is a spirited and highly readable account of his life and legend. Includes a foreword by Eric Clapton.

1941-1970: Spring, 1955: Berry’s “Maybellene” Popularizes Rock and Roll.