muddy waters
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<learn: culture/music> McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983),[1][2] better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". Muddy Waters' music laid the foundation for various American music genres, including rock and roll and subsequently rock.
A crater on Mercury was named in his honor in 2016 by the IAU. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked him at number 72 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. the rolling stones named themselves after Muddy Waters' 1950 song, "Rollin' Stone".
jimi hendrix recalled that "i first heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death". nuff said.
Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by the age of 17 was playing the guitar and the harmonica, copying local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson.[4] In 1941, Alan Lomax and Professor John W. Work III of Fisk University recorded him in Mississippi for the Library of Congress.[5][6] In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time professional musician. In 1946, he recorded his first records for Columbia Records and then for Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess.
In the early 1950s, Muddy Waters and his band—Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (also known as Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann on piano—recorded several songs that became blues classics, some with the bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon. These songs included "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "I'm Ready". In 1958, he traveled to England, laying the foundations of the resurgence of interest in the blues there. His performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 was recorded and released as his first live album, At Newport 1960.
His grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth. Grant gave him the nickname "Muddy" at an early age because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek.[9] "Waters" was added years later, as he began to play harmonica and perform locally in his early teens.[10] He taught himself to play harmonica.[11] The remains of the cabin on Stovall Plantation where he lived in his youth are now at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.[12][13]
He had his first introduction to music in church: "I used to belong to church. I was a good Baptist, singing in the church. So I got all of my good moaning and trembling going on for me right out of church," he recalled. By the time he was 17, he had purchased his first guitar. "I sold the last horse that we had. Made about fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother seven dollars and fifty cents, I kept seven-fifty and paid about two-fifty for that guitar. It was a Stella. The people ordered them from Sears-Roebuck in Chicago."[14] He started playing his songs in joints near his hometown, mostly on a plantation owned by Colonel William Howard Stovall.[15]