Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters

For more information on Muddy Waters, visit Britannica.com.

From the 1950s until his death, Muddy Waters (1915-1983) literally ruled Chicago with a commanding stage presence that combined both dignity and raw sexual appeal with a fierce and emotional style of slide guitar playing.

How many blues artists could boast of an alumni of band members that includes Otis Spann, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Fred Below, Walter Horton, Jimmy Rogers, James Cotton, Leroy Foster, Buddy Guy, Luther Johnson, Willie Dixon, Hubert Sumlin and Earl Hooker, just to name a few? Muddy Waters gave these and many more their first big break in music while creating a style known now as Chicago blues (guitar, piano, bass, drums, and harmonica). "Contemporary Chicago blues starts, and in some ways may very well end, with Muddy Waters, " wrote Peter Guralnick in Listener's Guide To The Blues.

Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915 but grew up in Clarksdale, where his grandmother raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for playing in mud earned him his nickname at an early age. Waters started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties and fish fries, emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. "His thick heavy tone, the dark coloration of his voice and his firm almost stolid manner were all clearly derived from House, " wrote Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, "but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson."

In 1940 Waters moved to St. Louis before playing with Silas Green a year later and returning back to Mississippi. In the early part of the decade he ran a juke house, complete with gambling, moonshine, a jukebox and live music courtesy of Muddy himself. In the summer of 1941 Alan Lomax came to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record various country blues musicians. "He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house, " Waters recalled in Rolling Stone, "and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it, I can do it."' Lomax came back again in July of 1942 to record Waters again. Both sessions were eventually released as Down On Stovall's Plantation on the Testament label.

In 1943 Waters headed north to Chicago in hopes of becoming a full-time professional. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and working in a factory by day and playing at night. Big Bill Broonzy was the top cat in Chicago until his death in 1958 and the city was a very competitive market for a newcomer to become established. Broonzy helped Waters out by letting him open for the star in the rowdy clubs. In 1945 Waters's uncle gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds.

In 1946 Waters recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they were never released. Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat, a newly-formed label run by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess. In 1947 Waters played guitar with Sunnyland Slim on piano on the cuts "Gypsy Woman" and "Little Anna Mae." These were also shelved, but in 1948 Waters's "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home" became big and his popularity in clubs began to take off. Soon after, Aristocrat changed their name to Chess and Waters's signature tune, "Rollin' Stone, " became a smash hit.

The Chess brothers would not allow Waters to use his own musicians (Jimmy Rogers and Blue Smitty) in the studio; instead he was only provided with a backing bass by Big Crawford. However, by 1950 Waters was recording with perhaps the hottest blues group ever: Little Walter Jacobs on harp; Jimmy Rogers on guitar; Elgin Evans on drums; Otis Spann on piano; Big Crawford on bass; and Waters handling vocals and slide guitar. The band recorded a string of great blues classics during the early 1950's with the help of bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon's pen. "Hoochie Coochie Man" (Number 8 on the R & B charts), "I Just Want To Make Love To You" (Number 4), and "I'm Ready." These three were "the most macho songs in his repertoire, " wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. "Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an image, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence."

Waters was at the height of his career and his band steamed like a high-powered locomotive, cruising form club to club as the Headhunters, crushing any other blues band that challenged their musical authority. "By the time he achieved his popular peak, Muddy Waters had become a shouting, declamatory kind of singer who had forsaken his guitar as a kind of anachronism and whose band played with a single pulsating rhythm, " wrote Guralnick in his Listener's Guide.

Unfortunately, Waters's success as the frontman led others in his group to seek the same recognition. In 1953 Little Walter left when his "Juke" became a hit and in 1955 Rogers quit to form his own band. Waters could never recapture the glory of his pre-1956 years as the pressures of being a leader led him to use various studio musicians for quite a few years following.

He headed to England in 1958 and shocked his overseas audiences with loud, amplified electric guitar and a thunderous beat. When R & B began to die down shortly after, Waters switched back to his older style of country blues. His gig at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 turned on a whole new generation to Waters's Delta sound. As English rockers like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones got hip to the blues, Waters switched back to electric circa 1964. He expressed anger when he realized that members of his own race were turning their backs to the genre while the white kids were showing respect and love for it.

However, for the better part of twenty years (since his last big hit in 1956, "I'm Ready") Waters was put on the back shelf by the Chess label and subjected to all sorts of ridiculous album themes: Brass And The Blues, Electric Mud, etc. In 1972 he went back to England to record The London Muddy Waters Sessions with four hotshot rockers - Rory Gallagher, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Mitch Mitchell - but their playing wasn't up to his standards. "These boys are top musicians, they can play with me, put the book before 'em and play it, you know, " he told Guralnick. "But that ain't what I need to sell my people, it ain't the Muddy Waters sound. An if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man."

The Waters sound was basically Delta country blues electrified, but his use of microtones, in both his vocals and slide playing, made it extremely difficult to duplicate and follow correctly. "When I plays onstage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me, " he said in Rolling Stone. "But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play."

Fortunately for Waters and his fans there was one man who understood the feeling he was trying to convey: Johnny Winter, an albino Texan who could play some of the nastiest guitar east or west of the Mississippi. In 1976 Winter convinced his label, Blue Sky, to sign Waters and the beginning of a fruitful partnership was begun. Waters's "comeback" LP, Hard Again, was recorded in just two days and was as close to the original Chicago sound he had created as anyone could ever hope for. Winter produced/ played and pushed the master to the limit. Former Waters sideman James Cotton kicked in on harp on the Grammy Award-winning album and a brief but incredible tour followed. "He sounds happy, energetic and out for business, " stated Dan Oppenheimer in Rolling Stone. "In short, Muddy Waters is kicking in another mule's stall."

In 1978 Winter recruited Walter Horton and Jimmy Rogers to help out on Waters's I'm Ready LP and another impressive outing was in the can. The roll continued in 1979 with the blistering Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. "Muddy was loose for this one, " wrote Jas Obrecht in Guitar Player, "and the result is the next best thing to being ringside at one of his foot-thumping, head-nodding, downhome blues shows." King Bee the following year concluded Water's reign at Blue Sky and all four LP's turned out to be his biggest-selling albums ever.

In 1983 Muddy Waters passed away in his sleep. At his funeral, throngs of blues musicians showed up to pay tribute to one of the true originals of the art form. "Muddy was a master of just the right notes, " John Hammond, Jr., told Guitar World. "It was profound guitar playing, deep and simple…. more country blues transposed to the electric guitar, the kind of playing that enhanced the lyrics, gave profundity to the words themselves." Two years after his death, the city that made Muddy Waters (and vice versa) honored their father by changing the name of 43rd Street to Muddy Waters Drive. Following Waters's death, B.B. King told Guitar World, "It's going to be years and years before most people realize how great he was to American music."

Further Reading

Christgau, Robert, Christgau's Record Guide Ticknor & Fields, 1981.

Guralnick, Peter, Feel Like Going Home, Vintage Books, 1981.

Guralnick, Peter, The Listener's Guide to the Blues, Facts on File, 1982.

Harris, Sheldon, Blues Who's Who, Da Capo, 1979.

Kozinn, Allan, Pete Welding, Dan Forte, and Gene Santoro, The Guitar: The History The Music The Players, Quill, 1984.

The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh with John Swenson, Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1979.

Guitar Player, July 1979; July 1983; August 1983.

Guitar World, September 1983; January 1986; March 1989; March 1990.

Living Blues, September-October 1989.

Rolling Stone, March 24, 1977; October 5, 1978.

blues singer

Personal Information

Born McKinley Morganfield, April 4, 1915, in Rolling Fork, MS; died April 30, 1983, in Chicago, IL.

Career

Performed with Big Joe Williams, Buddy Bradey, Louis Ford, Son Sims and Percy Thomas in Clarksdale, Mississippi in early 1940s; recorded for Library of Congress, 1941 and 1943; played first Chicago club gigs with Jimmy Rodgers 1943-44; first record, "I Can't Be Satisfied," released April 1948; appeared at Newport Folk Festival 1960.

Life's Work

Born in the area of rural Mississippi that spawned the first and greatest recorded bluesmen--Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson--Muddy Waters electrified the sounds of rural blues and brought them to Chicago. At his peak in the 1950s, he was the undisputed King of the Blues, a moniker he went so far as to have printed on his calling cards. His name eventually became synonymous with the Chicago blues, and by the time of his death he was the most famous and beloved bluesman in the world.

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1915 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, deep within cotton country. Sometime as a boy he was given the nickname Muddy Waters, for reasons no longer known. His sharecropper father, Ollie, played guitar but Muddy never had the chance to learn anything from him. After his mother's early death, he was sent away to be raised by his grandmother in Clarksdale. Waters worked the farm as a boy, but music was his real interest. "I always thought of myself as a musician," he said. "If I wasn't a good musician then, I felt that sooner or later I would be a good musician. I felt it in me."

Waters's first instrument was the harmonica, which he began learning when he was around 13. He played country suppers for tips and food with a guitarist friend. Guitars were all around him in the Mississippi Delta country, however, and while still a teenager Waters saw greats Charley Patton and Son House perform. House was an especially strong influence on Waters's playing. He showed the youngster the rudiments of playing slide guitar with a bottleneck and impressed young Waters with his powerful, emotional singing. Waters began playing guitar when he was 17.

Waters was soon playing local events. In the early 1940s he joined a group that included the singer Big Joe Williams that played around town. Muddy Waters' encounter with destiny took place in the summer of 1941 when Alan Lomax and John Work, two folklorists from the Library of Congress came to Clarksdale. The two men were looking for the legendary blues guitarist, Robert Johnson. Johnson, however, was dead, murdered years before. Instead, on Son House's recommendation, they found Muddy Waters at Stovall's plantation. Waters recorded two songs for the Library of Congress, "I Be's Troubled" and "Country Blues."

The songs impressed Lomax and Work enough that they returned to Stovall's two years later and recorded Waters again. His ambition and perhaps his confidence spurred by his two recording experiences, Waters got his first job as a professional musician, playing harmonica in the Silas Green Carnival for a short time. Clarksdale couldn't satisfy the Waters's needs though, and in May of 1943 he packed his bags and took the train north to Chicago.

Times were good in Chicago and Waters quickly found work and an apartment. Big Bill Broonzy, who had been part of the Chicago music scene for years, introduced him around. With Jimmy Rodgers, a guitarist and harp player, he began playing house parties around the South Side. "Little Walter, Jimmy Rodgers and myself," Waters later recalled, "we would go around looking for bands that were playing. We called ourselves The Headhunters, 'cause we'd go in and if we got a chance we were gonna burn 'em."

It was three years before Waters was finally able to record in Chicago. But the results of the sessions were just warmed over versions of the urban jump blues that were already a decade old and the record companies, 20th Century and Columbia, did not release any as records. Waters got another chance when pianist Sunnyland Slim, with whom he had been performing around Chicago, was offered a session with Leonard Chess' Aristocrat Records. According to legend, Waters was delivering venetian blinds when he heard that Slim wanted him to play the session. Waters is said to have told his boss that he needed the rest of the day off--his cousin had been found dead in an alley. Slim and Waters recorded two numbers each.

The music wouldn't have gone anywhere, except for the presence of a black music scout who arranged for another session, which resulted in a record for Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home." The songs were nothing like the smooth blues that had been popular in Chicago. Backed only by Waters's electric bottleneck guitar and Big Crawford's bass, they were raw, the delta blues transplanted to the city. Leonard Chess didn't like it. "I can't understand what he's singing," he complained to his partner. She insisted that the music had some indefinable something and pushed for its release.

The single, "Aristocrat 1305," came out on a Saturday in April of 1948. It was a smash hit. By two o'clock in the afternoon the first pressing had sold out completely. Muddy Waters went down to a record store on Chicago's Maxwell Street, he found his record being sold for $1.10 instead of the list price 79¢. To make matters worse, the record was so popular the store would only sell customers one copy, despite Waters's protestation "But I'm the man who made it!"

The unexpected success of the record forced Len Chess to reconsider his opinion of Waters's music. Waters was playing Chicago clubs regularly with Jimmy Rodgers and Baby Face Leroy. Chess did not want to give up a good thing. When new sessions were arranged, they were with Waters and Big Crawford again. They produced a string of classics nonetheless, including "You're Gonna Miss Me," "Little Geneva," and "Rollin' Stone." When Waters recorded with groups it was on the records others were making. He played on Baby Face Leroy's popular "Rollin' And Tumblin'" for example. When Leonard Chess found out he was incensed--he had hoped to keep Waters's trademark slide sound restricted to Aristocrat Records. He responded by having Waters record his own version of the song.

In 1950 Aristocrat Records became Chess Records, and Little Walter, perhaps the greatest blues harp player in history, joined the Muddy Waters band. Mike Rowe, in his history of the Chicago blues, Chicago Breakdown, wrote "The Muddy Waters records of 1950 and 1951 represent the purest and most successful strain of the new country blues." The songs they made include "Louisiana Blues," "Early Morning Blues," "Sad Letter Blues," and "Long Distance Call." Waters's sound continued to evolve, however. He and Rodgers refined the interaction of their two guitars, Junior Wells replaced Little Walter on harp, Otis Spann came in to play piano. By the middle 1950s, he had all but abandoned the spare instrumentation of his earlier hits and replaced it with the rollicking sound of the songs that would come to be most closely associated with Waters: "Hootchie Cootchie Man," "Mannish Boy," and "I Got My Mojo Workin'." The first record sold 4,000 copies in its first week in stores and stayed at the top of the charts for most of summer of 1954.

The middle 1950s represented Muddy Waters' peak as a recording artist. The musicians he recorded with during that period are a roster of the greats of the Chicago blues: harp players Big Walter Horton, Junior Wells, and James Cotton, guitarists Buddy Guy and Matt Murphy, pianists Otis Spann and Pinetop Perkins, drummer Fred Below and bass player Willie Dixon. Dixon was responsible for composing many of the songs Waters recorded in the latter half of the fifties.

With the rise of rock and roll, Waters's music--and blues music in general--entered a period of decline that would last until the end of his life. He continued to perform and make records during the 1960s. His performance at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival was electrifying and showed off his music to a whole new audience of young, white fans. He would continue to direct his music at this new audience and his 1960s albums, like The London Sessions which saw him team up with British rock musicians, like Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, and Fathers and Sons, with Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, reflected his new focus.

Waters's career experienced a kind of renaissance in the 1970, when blues-rock guitarist Johnny Winter became his manager. Recording and touring with Winter, Waters cut four albums that recaptured some of the old excitement, in particular a live effort, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters, mostly on the Columbia label. When Muddy Waters died suddenly of a heart attack in Chicago on April 30, 1983 an era in the blues came to an end forever. Waters was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1980 and into the Rock Hall of Fame in 1987. Many compilations and reissues have been released since his death. Waters's son, "Big Bill" Morganfield, has followed in his footsteps as a blues guitarist.

Awards

Inducted to Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, 1980; inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1987.

Works

Selected discography

• Muddy Waters at Newport, MCA/Chess, 1960.
• The Real Folk Blues, MCA/Chess, 1965.
• More Real Folk Blues, MCA/Chess, 1967.
• Hard Again, Blue Sky, 1977.
• Muddy "Mississippi" Waters, Blue Sky, 1979 .
• The Chess Box, MCA/Chess, 1990.

Further Reading

Books

• Erlewene, Michael, Vladímir Bogdana, Chris Woodstra, and Cub Koda. All Music Guide to the Blues, Freeman Books, 1996.
• Contemporary Musicians, Volume 24. Gale Group, 1999.
• Herzhaft, Gérard. Encyclopedia of the Blues, 2nd edition. University of Arkansas Press, 1997.
• Rowe, Mike. Chicago Breakdown, Da Capo, 1979.

— Gerald Brennan

• Born: April 04, 1915, Rolling Fork, MS
• Died: April 30, 1983, Westmont, IL
• Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s
• Genres: Blues
• Instrument: Guitar

Biography

A post-war Chicago blues scene without the magnificent contributions of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, is absolutely unimaginable. From the late '40s on, he eloquently defined the city's aggressive, swaggering, Delta-rooted sound with his declamatory vocals and piercing slide guitar attack. When he passed away in 1983, the Windy City would never quite recover.

Like many of his contemporaries on the Chicago circuit, Waters was a product of the fertile Mississippi Delta. Born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, he grew up in nearby Clarksdale on Stovall's Plantation. His idol was the powerful Son House, a Delta patriarch whose flailing slide work and intimidating intensity Waters would emulate in his own fashion.

Musicologist Alan Lomax traveled through Stovall's in August of 1941 under the auspices of the Library of Congress, in search of new talent for the purpose of field recording. With the discovery of Morganfield, Lomax must have immediately known he'd stumbled across someone very special.

Setting up his portable recording rig in the Delta bluesman's house, Lomax captured for Library of Congress posterity Waters' mesmerizing rendition of "I Be's Troubled," which became his first big seller when he recut it a few years later for the Chess brothers' Aristocrat logo as "I Can't Be Satisfied." Lomax returned the next summer to record his bottleneck-wielding find more extensively, also cutting sides by the Son Simms Four (a string band that Waters belonged to).

Waters was renowned for his blues-playing prowess across the Delta, but that was about it until 1943, when he left for the bright lights of Chicago. A tiff with "the boss man" apparently also had a little something to do with his relocation plans. By the mid-'40s, Waters' slide skills were becoming a recognized entity on Chicago's South side, where he shared a stage or two with pianists Sunnyland Slim and Eddie Boyd and guitarist Blue Smitty. Producer Lester Melrose, who still had the local recording scene pretty much sewn up in 1946, accompanied Waters into the studio to wax a date for Columbia, but the urban nature of the sides didn't electrify anyone in the label's hierarchy and remained unissued for decades.

Sunnyland Slim played a large role in launching the career of Muddy Waters. The pianist invited him to provide accompaniment for his 1947 Aristocrat session that would produce "Johnson Machine Gun." One obstacle remained beforehand: Waters had a day gig delivering Venetian blinds. But he wasn't about to let such a golden opportunity slip through his talented fingers. He informed his boss that a fictitious cousin had been murdered in an alley, so he needed a little time off to take care of business.

When Sunnyland was finished that auspicious day, Waters sang a pair of numbers, "Little Anna Mae" and "Gypsy Woman," that would become his own Aristocrat debut 78. They were rawer than the Columbia stuff, but not as inexorably down-home as "I Can't Be Satisfied" and its flip, "I Feel Like Going Home" (the latter was his first national R&B hit in 1948). With Big Crawford slapping the bass behind Waters' gruff growl and slashing slide, "I Can't Be Satisfied" was such a local sensation that even Muddy Waters himself had a hard time buying a copy down on Maxwell Street.

He assembled a band that was so tight and vicious on-stage that they were informally known as the Headhunters; they'd come into a bar where a band was playing, ask to sit in, and then "cut the heads" of their competitors with their superior musicianship. Little Walter, of course, would single-handedly revolutionize the role of the harmonica within the Chicago blues hierarchy; Jimmy Rogers was an utterly dependable second guitarist and Baby Face Leroy Foster could play both drums and guitar. On top of their instrumental skills, all four men could powerfully sing.

1951 found Waters climbing the R&B charts no less than four times, beginning with "Louisiana Blues" and continuing through "Long Distance Call," "Honey Bee," and "Still a Fool." Although it didn't chart, his 1950 classic "Rollin' Stone" provided a certain young British combo with a rather enduring name. Leonard Chess himself provided the incredibly unsubtle bass drum bombs on Waters' 1952 smash "She Moves Me."

"Mad Love," his only chart bow in 1953, is noteworthy as the first hit to feature the rolling piano of Otis Spann, who would anchor the Waters aggregation for the next 16 years. By this time, Foster was long gone from the band, but Rogers remained and Chess insisted that Walter -- by then a popular act in his own right -- make nearly every Waters session into 1958 (why breakup a winning combination?). There was one downside to having such a peerless band: As the ensemble work got tighter and more urbanized, Waters' trademark slide guitar was largely absent on many of his Chess waxings.

Willie Dixon was playing an increasingly important role in Muddy Waters' success. In addition to slapping his upright bass on Waters' platters, the burly Dixon was writing one future bedrock standard after another for him: "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Just Make Love to Me," and "I'm Ready"; all seminal performances and each blasted to the uppermost reaches of the R&B lists in 1954.

When labelmate Bo Diddley borrowed Waters' swaggering beat for his strutting "I'm a Man" in 1955, Muddy turned around and did him tit for tat by reworking the tune ever so slightly as "Mannish Boy" and enjoying his own hit. "Sugar Sweet," a pile-driving rocker with Spann's 88s anchoring the proceedings, also did well that year. 1956 brought three more R&B smashes: "Trouble No More," "Forty Days & Forty Nights," and "Don't Go No Farther."

But rock & roll was quickly blunting the momentum of veteran blues aces like Waters; Chess was growing more attuned to the modern sounds of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Moonglows, and the Flamingos. Ironically, it was Muddy Waters who had sent Berry to Chess in the first place.

After that, there was only one more chart item, 1958's typically uncompromising (and metaphorically loaded) "Close to You." But Waters' Chess output was still of uniformly stellar quality, boasting gems like "Walking Thru the Park" (as close as he was likely to come to mining a rock & roll groove) and "She's Nineteen Years Old," among the first sides to feature James Cotton's harp instead of Walter's, in 1958. That was also the year Muddy Waters and Spann made their first sojourn to England, where his electrified guitar horrified sedate Britishers accustomed to the folksy homilies of Big Bill Broonzy. Perhaps chagrined by the response, Waters paid tribute to Broonzy with a solid LP of his material in 1959.

Cotton was apparently the bandmember who first turned Muddy on to "Got My Mojo Working," originally cut by Ann Cole in New York. Waters' 1956 cover was pleasing enough but went nowhere on the charts. But when the band launched into a supercharged version of the same tune at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, Cotton and Spann put an entirely new groove to it, making it an instant classic (fortuitously, Chess was on hand to capture the festivities on tape).

As the 1960s dawned, Waters' Chess sides were sounding a trifle tired. Oh, the novelty thumper "Tiger in Your Tank" packed a reasonably high-octane wallop, but his adaptation of Junior Wells' "Messin' With the Kid" (as "Messin' With the Man") and a less-than-timely "Muddy Waters Twist" were a long way removed indeed from the mesmerizing Delta sizzle that Waters had purveyed a decade earlier.

Overdubbing his vocal over an instrumental track by guitarist Earl Hooker, Waters laid down an uncompromising "You Shook Me" in 1962 that was a step in the right direction. Drummer Casey Jones supplied some intriguing percussive effects on another 1962 workout, "You Need Love," which Led Zeppelin liked so much that they purloined it as their own creation later on.

In the wake of the folk-blues boom, Waters reverted to an acoustic format for a fine 1964 LP, Folk Singer, that found him receiving superb backing from guitarist Buddy Guy, Dixon on bass, and drummer Clifton James. In October, he ventured overseas again as part of the Lippmann and Rau-promoted American Folk Blues Festival, sharing the bill with Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, and Lonnie Johnson.

The personnel of the Waters band was much more fluid during the 1960s, but he always whipped them into first-rate shape. Guitarists Pee Wee Madison, Luther "Snake Boy" Johnson, and Sammy Lawhorn, harpists Mojo Buford and George Smith, bassists Jimmy Lee Morris and Calvin "Fuzz" Jones, and drummers Francis Clay and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith (along with Spann, of course) all passed through the ranks.

In 1964, Waters cut a two-sided gem for Chess, "The Same Thing"/"You Can't Lose What You Never Had," that boasted a distinct 1950s feel in its sparse, reflexive approach. Most of his subsequent Chess catalog, though, is fairly forgettable. Worst of all were two horrific attempts to make him a psychedelic icon. 1968's Electric Mud forced Waters to ape his pupils via an unintentionally hilarious cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" (session guitarist Phil Upchurch still cringes at the mere mention of this album). After the Rain was no improvement the following year.

Partially salvaging this barren period in his discography was the Fathers and Sons project, also done in 1969 for Chess, which paired Muddy Waters and Spann with local youngbloods Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield in a multigenerational celebration of legitimate Chicago blues.

After a period of steady touring worldwide but little standout recording activity, Waters' studio fortunes were resuscitated by another of his legion of disciples, guitarist Johnny Winter. Signed to Blue Sky, a Columbia subsidiary, Waters found himself during the making of the first LP, Hard Again, backed by pianist Pinetop Perkins, drummer Willie Smith, and guitarist Bob Margolin from his touring band, Cotton on harp, and Winter's slam-bang guitar, Waters roared like a lion who had just awoken from a long nap.

Three subsequent Blue Sky albums continued the heartwarming back-to-the-basics campaign. In 1980, his entire combo split to form the Legendary Blues Band; needless to note, he didn't have much trouble assembling another one (new members included pianist Lovie Lee, guitarist John Primer, and harpist Mojo Buford).

By the time of his death in 1983, Muddy Waters' exalted place in the history of blues (and 20th century popular music, for that matter) was eternally assured. The Chicago blues genre that he turned upside down during the years following World War II would never recover, and that's a debt we'll never be able to repay. ~ Bill Dahl, All Music Guide

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