McKinley Morganfield "Muddy Waters"

McKinley Morganfield "Muddy Waters"

1915-1983

He came up from Clarksdale, Mississippi in the 1940s. Clarksdale, home of John Lee Hooker and countless other blues players. Clarksdale, where his old log cabin stood on the old Stovall Plantation until it was destroyed in the early 1990s. Clarksdale, where Alan and John Lomax, toting a huge old disk recorder, found him and got him to make some records for the Smithsonian Institution.

When he wasn't working other jobs in the early days, Muddy recorded everything he could get his hands on, and made some tunes his own. For instance, Muddy may or may not have been the first to record Mannish Boy (Bo Diddley, who also recorded at Chess, may have been, and they're both listed on the credits -- there's a lot of confusion) but once Muddy recorded something, he owned it. Only rarely did a tune Muddy wrote end up being better identified with someone else. Evil, heard here in a rare June 1957 recording, is most often heard played by Howlin' Wolf. And many of the songs Muddy recorded were written by Willie Dixon. But when Muddy sang, he took you down through the things that can happen to a country boy in the city, because he had lived it. Muddy worked the plantations. Muddy worked the mills. Muddy drove trucks. Muddy never forgot where he came from. And he changed the sound of the blues forever, from a meandering, acoustic country wail to a powerful freight train, rolling through the music, unstoppable.

The popularity of blues among suburban middle-class whites has lately been a puzzle to me. It's as if they're trying to get back some emotional connection to the real life they lost somewhere. But Muddy knew the truth. You can't lose what you ain't never had.