Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in 1913 on Stovall Plantation in Mississippi, where the blues was not a profession but a way of talking about what the day cost you. He learned guitar from Son House and absorbed Robert Johnson's recordings, studying the slide technique that would become his signature. When he moved to Chicago in 1943 as part of the Great Migration, he brought the Delta with him and found that the city needed a louder voice. The acoustic guitar could not compete with the noise of the factories, the trains, the crowded streets of the industrial North. He plugged in. Chess Records signed him in 1948, and the electric Chicago blues was born in a series of sessions that sounded like a man fighting back against the machine with nothing but a guitar and his own two hands.
Hoochie Coochie Man is the one. That opening riff, the bass line that walks like it owns the street, Muddy's voice coming in not as a singer but as a conjurer calling spirits. Willie Dixon wrote it, but Muddy made it a spell that has not worn off. I'm a man.
I'm a hoochie coochie man. Every British rock band in the 1960s learned from this record. The Rolling Stones named themselves after one of his songs. The blues that Muddy Waters electrified became the DNA of rock and roll, and he never pretended to be comfortable with the fame it brought him. He kept playing small clubs even after the world caught up, kept recording, kept being the man who made the guitar sound like it had something urgent to say.
He died in 1983 at seventy, and the music he left behind is the foundation of every electric guitar that has been plugged in since. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix -- they all came through Muddy Waters. He did not invent the blues. He simply plugged it in and let the electricity do the rest. The amplifier was not a gimmick. It was the truth the Delta had been trying to tell, finally loud enough for the whole world to hear and recognize itself in the sound.
Muddy Waters was profiled in the documentary, Muddy Waters: The Hoochie Coochie Man, in 2001.
