I remember seeing Muddy Waters for the first time when I was seventeen. He was part of the concert movie, The Last Waltz, staged by The Band. He was a dignified, older black gentleman, looking for all the world like a minister who'd wandered onto the wrong stage, surrounded by a bunch of scraggily-looking white kids, and singing the most amazing Blues song I'd ever heard.
Not only was it the first time I'd heard Muddy Waters sing, it was the first time I'd heard the song "Mannish Boy." By that time in the movie, we'd already seen a good many of popular music's elite come on stage and strut their stuff, and all this guy had too do was stand still, open his mouth, and start singing to blow them all away.
He just planted himself there on the stage and you knew that he was rock solid. His music came from somewhere that none of these others had tapped into and probably never would. Oh Clapton, Butterfield, Al Kooper, and Robbie Robertson can all technically pull off the Blues, and some even have enough soul that they occasionally catch a glimpse of the real thing, but they never matched the experience of living the Blues that Muddy Waters could bring to a song.
For months after seeing him sing that song, I was hearing that driving beat in my head and that voice singing out. The only thing I came across that was equal to the power of that voice was upon hearing a black gospel group later in the year who declaimed their music in the same way. The only difference being that while they were singing about God and being saved, Muddy Waters was singing about more profane maters, stuff that happened here on earth and not in some tentative hereafter.
McKinley Morganfield was born in either 1913 or-15 depending on which birth certificate is to believed, in Jug's Corners, Mississippi. He was first recorded in 1941 when Alan Lomax came down South thinking to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress, only to discover Johnson had been dead for three years. Instead he was pointed towards Waters who played a similar style of bottleneck slide as Johnson.
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