Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters (born April 4, 1913?, near Rolling Fork, Mississippi, U.S.—died April 30, 1983, Westmont, Illinois) was a dynamic American blues guitarist and singer who played a major role in creating the post-World War II electric blues that typified the Chicago blues style. His music profoundly influenced many rock artists, especially British blues-based bands of the 1960s.

Early life and career

Waters, whose nickname came from his proclivity for playing in a creek as a boy, grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised principally by his grandmother on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He taught himself to play harmonica as a child and took up guitar at age 17. He eagerly absorbed the classic Delta blues styles of Robert Johnson, Son House, and others while developing a style of his own. Many years later he told musician and writer James Rooney,

I had it in my mind even then to either play music or preach or do something that I would be known, that people would know me. I kept that on my mind. I wanted to be a known person. All of my life. That’s what I worked for. I wanted to be internationally known. And I worked on it, from when I was a kid up.

As a young man, Waters drove a tractor on the sharecropped plantation, and on weekends he operated the cabin in which he lived as a “juke house,” where visitors could party and imbibe moonshine made by Waters. He performed both on his own and in a band, occasionally earning a little money playing at house parties. He was first recorded in 1941, for the U.S. Library of Congress by archivist Alan Lomax, who had come to Mississippi in search of Johnson (who had already died by that time).

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Father of Chicago blues

In 1943 Waters—like millions of other African Americans in the South who moved to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration from 1916 to 1970—relocated to Chicago. There he began playing clubs and bars on the city’s South and West sides while earning a living working in a paper mill and later driving a truck. In 1944 his uncle gave him his first electric guitar, which cut more easily through the noise of crowded bars. He soon broke with country blues by playing electric guitar in a shimmering slide style. In 1946 pianist Sunnyland Slim, another Delta native, helped Waters land a contract with Aristocrat Records, for which he made several unremarkable recordings.

By 1948 Aristocrat had become Chess Records (taking its name from Leonard and Phil Chess, the Polish immigrant brothers who owned and operated the company), and Waters was recording a string of hits for the label that began with “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” His early, aggressive, electrically amplified band—including pianist Otis Spann, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and harmonica virtuoso Little Walter—created closely integrated support for Waters’s passionate singing, which featured dramatic shouts, swoops, and falsetto moans. His repertoire, some of which he composed, included lyrics that were mournful (“Blow Wind Blow,” “Trouble No More”), boastful (“Got My Mojo Working,” “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Mannish Boy”), and frankly sensual (the unusual 15-bar blues “Rock Me”). In the process Waters became the foremost exponent of modern Chicago blues.

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Tours of clubs in the South and Midwest in the 1940s and ’50s gave way after 1958 to concert tours of the United States and Europe, including frequent dates at jazz, folk, and blues festivals. Over the years, some of Chicago’s premier blues musicians did stints in Waters’s band, including harmonica players James Cotton and Junior Wells, as well as guitarist Buddy Guy. Toward the end of his career, Waters concentrated on singing and played guitar only occasionally. In 1975 he left Chess, which had been sold by the Chess brothers and turned into a reissue-only label. Two years later Waters released Hard Again, a critically acclaimed “comeback album” produced by guitarist Johnny Winter for the Blue Sky label. His other Blue Sky albums include I’m Ready (1978) and King Bee (1981). In 1978 Waters had a memorable appearance in Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz.

Legacy

Waters was an artist who was fully aware of his enormous contributions to American popular music. In 1978 he told Robert Palmer, author of Deep Blues (1981), “My blues looks so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.” After being treated for lung cancer in the early 1980s, Waters died from a heart attack in 1983.

He was a member of the inaugural class (1980) of the Blues Hall of Fame. A major influence on a variety of rock musicians—most notably the British band the Rolling Stones (who took their name from his song “Rollin’ Stone” and made a pilgrimage to Chess to record during their first tour of the United States)—Waters was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Six of his albums earned Grammy Awards, and he received the Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1992.

In 2004 the U.S. Library of Congress added “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In 2021 Waters’s home at 4339 South Lake Park Avenue in Chicago’s North Kenwood neighborhood was designated a city landmark.

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