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Chicago blues
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Muddy Waters sits playing an electric guitar, looking slightly upward with a cigarette in his mouth, circa 1950. Map of the Blues Highway, U.S. Route 61, marked in pink with music note icons highlighting key blues cities, including off-route cities like Chicago and Nashville. Phil Chess, Etta James, and Ralph Bass pose together in Chess Records Studios, Chicago, 1960, with a microphone and recording equipment in front of them. Music at the Maxwell Street Market
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Muddy Waters sits playing an electric guitar, looking slightly upward with a cigarette in his mouth, circa 1950.
Muddy Waters, c. 1950 In 1943 blues musician Muddy Waters migrated from Mississippi to Chicago. The following year he was given an electric guitar by his uncle. The rest is history.

Chicago blues

music
Written by
René Ostberg
René Ostberg is an associate editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
René Ostberg
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

In May 1943 a musician named McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, boarded a train in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His destination was Chicago. Waters was one of millions of African Americans who made the journey from the rural South to the urban North in the early and mid-20th century. But his arrival in Chicago was of special consequence for the city and for popular music. By the 1950s he and several other musicians were performing...

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