Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters (1913–1983) was an American blues musician and singer-songwriter whose amplified Chicago blues shaped postwar blues and rock.
Little Walter: An American blues harmonica player and singer who helped define amplified Chicago blues. His harmonica became a defining part of Waters’s early Chicago band sound.
Chicago blues: An urban blues style shaped in Chicago, often featuring amplified guitar, harmonica, bass, drums, and piano. Waters helped establish its electric ensemble sound after moving from Mississippi.
“Rollin’ Stone”: A 1950 Muddy Waters recording whose title and sparse guitar figure drew on Delta blues. This recording supplied the name for the Rolling Stones and later inspired rock musicians.
Chess Records: A Chicago record label that released influential blues and early rock recordings from 1950 to 1969. Chess released Waters’s defining postwar recordings and built his national reputation.
Rolling Fork, Mississippi: A city in the Mississippi Delta where Muddy Waters was born in 1913. Waters’s origins in this Delta community connect his music to Mississippi blues.
Willie Dixon: An American blues songwriter, bassist, and producer whose songs became standards. Dixon wrote and produced several of Waters’s best-known Chess recordings.
Electric guitar: A guitar that uses electromagnetic pickups to convert string vibration into an electrical signal. Its amplification gave Waters’s guitar the volume and presence central to his band sound.
“Hoochie Coochie Man”: A 1954 Muddy Waters song written by Willie Dixon and recorded for Chess Records. Its stop-time arrangement and boastful lyrics became a model for electric blues.
British blues: A British music movement that adapted American blues through bands and solo performers from the 1950s onward. Waters’s records were a major source for British blues musicians in the 1960s.
Stovall Plantation: A plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Muddy Waters lived and worked before moving north. Alan Lomax recorded Waters there in 1941, preserving an early performance.