Chicago in the 1950s was not a circuit for the faint-hearted. To venture into the blues dives that dotted the city’s South Side was to enter a hard, violent, visceral subculture, epitomised by the episode in Buddy Guy’s memoirs where a murderous barfly arrived at a club holding his wife’s severed head. If the punters weren’t intimidating enough, the competition was.
On any given night, at any given bar, you’d have found a jobbing legend, from Otis Rush and Magic Sam to white-boy interlopers like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield. Always on the prowl, meanwhile, was the big, bad Howlin’ Wolf.
Yet Muddy Waters was the kingpin. Born in Mississippi as McKinley Morganfield, the young bluesman was recorded for the first time during a 1941 visit by field archivist Alan Lomax, and rode the confidence from that first pressing into amove north to Chicago.
Brought aboard the nascent label of Leonard and Phil Chess – and backed by a band that included harpist Little Walter and piano man Otis Spann – the early-50s saw Muddy fire off the songs that remain standards. Mannish Boy, Hoochie Coochie Man, Got My Mojo Workin’, I Just Wanna Make Love To You: all were delivered with afruity baritone, lashings of revolutionary electric slide and asoupçonof justified arrogance.
Even so, Muddy’s imperious run was starting to falter before he was championed by the fanboys on the far side of the Atlantic. In 1958, he was brought over by jazz man Chris Barber, and the amplified thump of those performances proved the starting-pistol for the British boom, galvanising Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to start London’s R&B scene, and mobilising upstarts from Eric Clapton to the Rolling Stones (even their band name was lifted from Waters’ 1950 single).
Muddy didn’t always excel (witness the honking psych-rock of 1968’s Electric Mud), but he always endured. After the fall of Chess, the patronage of those younger rockers kept him afloat, with 1977’s Johnny Winter-produced Hard Again proving one of his very best. Even today, decades after his 1983 death from a heart attack, those formidable ripples continue to spread. “At the end of the day,” notes Joe Bonamassa, “there’s only one Muddy Waters.”
