Muddy Waters

No single career maps this site’s central artery — Delta to Chicago to rock — as cleanly as Muddy Waters’s. In 1941, Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress field unit recorded McKinley Morganfield, a tractor driver on Stovall Plantation, Mississippi, singing in the style of his models Son House and Robert Johnson. Hearing the playback, he later said, was the moment he knew: “I can do it” (Lomax 1993; Gordon 2002).

He took the Illinois Central to Chicago in 1943, switched to electric guitar to be heard over the clubs, and from 1948’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied” built the definitive Chicago blues band — Little Walter on amplified harmonica, Otis Spann on piano, Willie Dixon writing and playing bass. The mid-fifties Chess sides — “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I’m Ready,” “Mannish Boy” — are the genre’s monument (Gordon 2002).

His shadow on rock is direct and acknowledged: the Rolling Stones took their name from his “Rollin’ Stone”; Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the magazine completed the citation chain. When Waters played England in 1958, his electric guitar scandalized folk purists and converted the young musicians who would lead the British blues revival — the export branch of the Chicago sound.