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Re: Colt1861Navy post# 917

Saturday, 07/20/2002 8:53:11 AM

Saturday, July 20, 2002 8:53:11 AM

Rock 'n' Roll Artists A-Z...Muddy Waters...The King of Electric Blues

http://www.muddywaters.com/

http://www.blueflamecafe.com/index.html

http://centerstage.net/music/whoswho/MuddyWaters.html

http://www.island.net/~blues/morgan.html

http://muddywatersbar.com/muddywatersbar/Homepage.cfm

APRIL 4, 1915 - APRIL 30, 1983 <RIP...You laid the foundation>

Anyone who's followed the course of modern popular music is aware of the vast influence exerted on its development by the large numbers of blues artists who collectively shaped and defined the approach to amplified music in the late 1940s and early '50s. Chicago was the pivotal point for the development and dissemination of the modern blues and virtually everything else has flowed, in one way or another, from this rich source.

The revolution began inauspiciously enough in 1948 with the release of a 78-rpm single by a singer-guitarist called Muddy Waters. Coupled on Aristocrat 1305 were a pair of traditional Mississippi Delta-styled pieces "I Cant Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home," and on them Waters' dark, majestic singing. Waters' use of amplification gave his guitar playing a new, powerful, striking edge and sonority that introduced to traditional music a sound its listeners found very exciting, comfortably familiar yet strangely compelling and, above all, immensely powerful, urgent.

From the start it was he who dominated the music, who led the way-in style, sound, repertoire, instrumentation, in every way-first as a greatly popular club performer from the mid-1940s on and, a few years later, as the most influential recording artist in the new amplified blues idiom. In the years 1948-55 he put forth for definition the fundamental approaches and usages of modern blues in a remarkable series of ground-breaking and, as time has shown, classic records. In the years since, the style Waters delineated has been extended, fragmented, elaborated and otherwise commercialized, but the fundamental earthy, vital, powerful sound of the postwar blues as defined by Muddy and his bandsmen has yet to be excelled-or even equaled, come to that. It's no accident The Rolling Stones chose their name from one of Waters' finest early recordings the choice was merely prophetic, for Muddy and his magnificent bedrock music continue to resonate as thrillingly and powerfully through the music of today as they did back in the late '40s and early '50s when we first heard them.

He was born McKinley Morganfield-Muddy Waters is a nickname given him in childhood-in the tiny hamlet of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, on April 4, 1915, but from the age of three, when his mother died, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Clarksdale, a small town one hundred miles to the north.

It is scarcely surprising then that the Delta region has nurtured a tradition of blues singing and playing that reflects the harsh, brutal life there, a music shot through with all the agonized tension, bitterness, stark power and raw passion of life lived at or near the brink of despair. Poised between life and death, the Delta bluesman gave vent to his terror, frustration, rage and passionate humanity in a music that was taut with dark, brooding force and spellbinding intensity that was jagged, harsh, raw as an open wound and profoundly, inexorably, moving. The great Delta blues musicians-Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson and, especially in Waters' case, the brilliant, tortured Robert Johnson-sang with a naked force, majesty and total conviction that make their music timeless and universal in its power to touch and move us deeply.

Growing to manhood there, in the very heart of the region that had spawned this magnificent music, Waters was drawn early to its stark, telling, expressive power. He had been working as a farm laborer for several years when at thirteen he took up the harmonica, the instrument on which many blues performers first master the music's rudiments. Four years later he made the switch to guitar. "You see, I was digging Son House and Robert Johnson." The two were the undisputed masters of the region's characteristic "bottleneck" style of guitar accompaniment. With this technique the Delta bluesman could utilize the guitar as a perfect extension of his voice, the sliding bottleneck matching the dips, slurs, sliding notes and all the tonal ambiguity of the voice as it is used in singing the blues.

Within a year, Waters recalled, he had mastered the bottleneck style and the jagged, pulsating rhythms of Delta guitar. He had learned to sing powerfully and expressively in the tightly constricted, pain-filled manner that characterized the best Delta singers. By the time a team of Library of Congress field collectors headed by Alan Lomax visited and recorded Waters for the Library's folksong archives in 1941 (they were looking for Robert Johnson at the time, unaware of his death three years earlier), returning to record him further the following year, he had had several years' local performing experience behind him.

Providing the musical impetus for dancers at rough-and-tumble back country dances, in juke joints, and at picnics, houseparties and other rural entertainments had sharpened the young bluesman's vocal and instrumental abilities to a keen edge. The recordings show the strikingly distinctive power of the young Waters, both as singer and master of Delta bottleneck guitar.

The following year Muddy put the Delta behind him forever. He moved to Chicago in 1943, and never looked back. But it was not as easy in the Windy City as the young bluesman had imagined. It was the middle of the war and, though times were flush and there was a great deal of money to be earned in the defense industries, the winds of change were blowing uncertainly through the music world.

Spearheading the new blues was Waters. He had persevered with his music. After several years of playing to slowly increasing audiences, first at houseparties and later in small taverns dotted throughout Chicago's huge, sprawling South and West Side black-belt slums, he had begun to record. Ironically enough, it was for Columbia Records that he had made his first recordings as a Chicago bluesman. Unfortunately, the recordings were not issued. Working as a truck driver, Waters had managed to persuade the operators of Aristocrat-later Chess-Records, a small, independent Chicago firm, to record him.

After several exploratory recordings made in the company of pianist Sunnyland Slim and bassist Ernest "Big" Crawford which made absolutely no impression on the record-buying public, Waters suddenly scored with the single "I Can't Be Satisfied/I Feel Like Going Home." And it is with this record that the history of the modern Chicago blues properly begins. Over the next few years, Waters gathered around him a group of like-minded, country-reared musicians with whom he proceeded to make blues history.

Over the surging rhythmic momentum his group developed so effortlessly, Waters' dark-hued voice chanted the Mississippi blues of his boyhood. In his singing could be heard echoes of the great Delta singers he so admired. Robert Johnson's music, especially, is at the root of so many of Waters' early commercial recordings. But even if the source of the music is not specifically Johnson, it is ultimately based in the traditional blues of his native Mississippi Delta, always the linchpin of Waters' approach to music, as attested by "Rollin' Stone" and "Still A Fool" (both remarkable reworkings of the Delta standard "Catfish Blues"), "Standing Around Crying," "Rollin' And Tumblin'," "Honey Bee," among many others.

Following his earliest recordings, made primarily of traditional Mississippi blues staples and his adaptations of them, Muddy slowly broadened the traditional base of his music to incorporate new instrumental sounds and textures. Memorable among these early efforts were the remarkable trio recordings with Little Walter on harmonica and Crawford on bass in support of his incisive amplified bottleneck guitar: "Louisiana Blues," and "Long Distance Call," dating from 1950 or early '51 are justly praised masterpieces of the postwar blues. Waters' regular second guitarist during this period was the empathetic, almost telepathic Jimmy Rogers whose deft, rhythmically unerring playing was unparalleled in the modern blues. A member of Waters' working band from the late 1940s, he was not to make his appearance on a Waters record until the end of 1951, the same time pianist Otis Spann was added to the group's lineup for live performances. With him on board, the modern blues band format and sound was fully settled, documented on such Waters band performances as "I Just Want To Make Love To You," "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I'm Ready" (1954), "Just To Be With You" (1956) and a host of others.

With the ensemble finally settled, the final element was added in the form of Willie Dixon the veteran bassist whose abilities as a songwriter of proven talent, versatility and audience-pleasing cleverness enabled Waters to achieve even wider success through the many songs he wrote specifically for, and in some cases helped produce for the singer-guitarist and his crack ensemble. From the middle 1950s Waters' songwriting became almost wholly urban in character, as for example "She's Nineteen Years Old," "Walkin' Thru The Park," "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had" and the anthemic "Got My Mojo Working," among others.

All through the 1950s Waters solidified and extended his initial success with a series of recordings, many of them absolutely brilliant and none less than satisfying, that firmly established his approach as the dominant postwar blues style. Countless groups emulated its brusque, rude force and thrilling sonorities though few were able to match the peerless ensemble integration it attained so consistently and effortlessly. Members of Waters' various bands-guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Sammy Lawhorn and Luther Johnson, harmonica players Little Walter, Junior Wells and James Cotton, pianists Otis Spann and Pinetop Perkins-left to strike out with bands of their own, spreading the Waters gospel further. Later generations of bluesmen took Waters' approach as their birthright: Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Otis Rush and scores of others-have all been in Waters' debt.

Four decades and more later, the blues of postwar Chicago remain the standard bearers, the yardstick by which all others have been and continue to be measured. Waters, his cohorts and immediate followers had limned definitively the contours of the style, and it was they who extended and reworked the idiom, bringing it to its highest levels. The stage was set for the music's next development, rock-and-roll and its offshoots and permutations.

As the 1950s gave way to the '60s, blues of the direct, yeasty sort Waters and his bandsmen performed so tellingly became ever less relevant to black listeners who increasingly involved themselves with soul music and its offshoots, the more urbane blues styles of B.B. King and his disciples, and various forms of modern black dance music.

By this time, however, Waters and other blues performers of his generation had been discovered and taken up by a new audience-young, white and middle-class that had been born of the folk music revival of the late 1950s and swelled even further a few years later by the British blues boom. The bars, taverns and dancehalls of the chitlin' circuit in which he had performed for black dancers and listeners in the previous decade soon had given way to college auditoriums, folksong, blues and jazz clubs and festival stages, both here and abroad, increasing international touring, television appearances and wide acceptance by the rock community, which accorded him the respectful adulation given a founding figure. His young white listeners gained the beauty and majesty of his music.

Through all this his mentors at Chess Records sought to keep pace with the changing tides in popular music, in response to which they placed Waters in a number of recording contexts they felt would broaden his acceptance even further. The most sensitive and, happily, one of the best received of these productions was the 2-LP set "Fathers And Sons," which paid homage to Waters and his achievements through the sponsorship and participation of several young musicians who had learned directly from him, repaying the favor by using their celebrity to focus attention on him-the brilliant young harmonica player Paul Butterfield and guitarist Michael Bloomfield. In 1977, his long association with Chess at an end, he signed with Blue Sky Records, a label operated by another of his young proteges, the guitarist and singer Johnny Winter, and over the next several years produced four spirited albums under Winter's sympathetic guidance.

Waters performed almost uninterruptedly, invariably giving of his best and often, when circumstances conspired to allow it, setting the night on fire with the strength, passion and conviction that only he could muster. He carried his message to countless listeners, first in Chicago, then all the rest of the U.S. and finally, the world. When he died quietly in his sleep on April 30, 1983, in his home in suburban Westmont Illinois, America lost one of the greatest, most influential and enduringly important musicians of the century, one who had reshaped the course of the blues, set it on a new path and, through the influence he exerted on so many other who followed in his trailblazing wake, completely altered the sound, substance and very character of all modern popular music.

-Pete Welding, excerpted from "Gone to Mainstreet," Bluesland, E.P. Dutton, 1992

*******************************************
Bio Two

Muddy Waters was the patriarch of post-World War II Chicago blues. A master artist who played slashing slide guitar and sang with the tough, sinewy view of a man who had seen his share of good and evil in life, Waters was also a compelling songwriter and song interpreter, a powerful stage performer and recording artist, and a superb bandleader. A list of those musicians who passed through his bands reads like a Who's Who of Chicago blues greats. Guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Pat Hare, Luther Tucker, and Earl Hooker; harp players Little Walter, Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton, James Cotton, and Carey Bell; bass player Willie Dixon; pianists Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, and Pinetop Perkins; and drummers Elgin Evans, Fred Below, and Francis Clay are just some of the bluesmen who played in the Muddy Waters Band at one time or another. Many of these artists went on to lead prestigious blues bands of their own, or became highly respected sidemen, though none, save Little Walter, ever came close to attaining the success or building the legacy that Waters did.

The list of artists Waters influenced would go on almost indefinitely. Besides the entire generation of Chicago blues artists who came of age in the '50s and '60s, Waters also left his mark on dozens of British and American blues rockers. Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, and the Rolling Stones (who named their group after one of Waters' songs) are just the tip of the iceberg.

The attraction of Waters' brand of blues is due to his brilliant blues artistry and his critical role in providing the link between deep Mississippi Delta blues and hard-edged, urban and electric Chicago blues; more than any other musician, Waters was responsible for the mesh between old and new blues in the early postwar period.

Waters also helped transform the blues guitar sound. Although other bluesmen had recorded with an electric guitar before Waters did, his importance as an innovative player is substantial. Waters' guitar work was raw and vital and executed with the same urgency as the blues of Robert Johnson and Son House, two of Waters' mentors.

Waters was a convincing blues dignitary; an impeccably sharp dresser and a man who, though uneducated, spoke about the blues with a simple eloquence, he helped cultivate for the blues a respect the music had never known before.

During the years 1951 to 1960, there wasn't a more compelling blues band anywhere than the Muddy Waters Blues Band. They juiced the music with a rocking backbeat and an unfiltered down-home intensity. Waters' blues possessed an honesty and emotional clarity. He saw the blues as a vehicle by which he could speak about human suffering, jubilation, and truth. For these reasons, he stands out as one of the greatest artists the blues has ever produced.

Waters was born into a Mississippi Delta sharecropping family in 1915. His mother died when he was three, and he was raised by his grandmother, who lived on Stovall's Plantation, just outside Clarksdale. Waters got his nickname as a child because he loved to play near a muddy creek. He learned how to sing out in the cotton fields, where, as a youth, he worked for fifty cents a day. When he was a young boy, perhaps seven or eight, Waters learned how to play the harmonica. He didn't learn how to play guitar until he was seventeen. Not long afterwards, he began to perform at house parties and fish fries with friends Scott Bohannon (or Bowhandle) and Henry "Son" Simms. Impressed by the deep blues sounds that Delta bluesman Son House drew from his guitar, Waters built his style from what he saw and heard House play. Later, Waters would also borrow guitar ideas from Robert Johnson.

Waters first recorded in 1941. He cut a number of songs for folklorist Alan Lomax, who was collecting songs for the Library of Congress. Two of them- "I Be's Troubled" and "Country Blues"-were released on a Library of Congress folk anthology album. A year later, when Lomax returned to the plantation, Waters recorded for him a second time.

Waters left the Mississippi Delta for Chicago in 1943. Big Bill Broonzy helped him break into the city's thriving blues scene. For a while, Waters played acoustic guitar behind John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson. But his reputation as a performer didn't take shape until 1944 when he began to play an electric guitar, teaming up with Jimmy Rogers on harp and Claude Smith on guitar, and then with Eddie Boyd on piano (later joined by Sunnyland Slim). Waters was still playing in a traditional Delta bottleneck style, but his sound was fatter and louder and far more moving than before.

Waters' first Chicago recordings, which were made in 1946 for producer Lester Melrose and Columbia Records, featured Waters with a five-piece band. These tracks weren't released until 1971. (Waters also allegedly recorded at least one song, "Mean Red Spider," using the pseudonym James "Sweet Lucy" Carter in 1946 or '47.) In 1947 Waters played guitar behind Sunnyland Slim on two Aristocrat sides, "Johnson Machine Gun" and "Fly Right Little Girl." Two other songs, "Gypsy Woman" and "Little Anna Mae," were recorded by Waters and bass player Big Crawford. Not impressed with the results, producer Leonard Chess nonetheless brought Waters and Crawford back into the recording studio in 1948, at which time the duo cut "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "Feel Like Going Home." The two songs were performed in a traditional Delta blues style, but Waters' shivering electric guitar gave them an exciting new edge. Chess released the songs as an Aristocrat single (number 1305). In less than a day, the record's entire stock had been sold.

The record's startling success prompted Chess to bring Waters back into the studio. Eager to stay with what worked, Chess insisted that the lineup-Waters on guitar and vocals and Crawford on bass remain the same, even though at the time Waters was working regularly in Chicago clubs with a full band (featuring Jimmy Rogers on second guitar and harmonica and "Baby Face" Leroy Foster on drums and guitar. A little later Little Walter Jacobs joined the band on harmonica. Waters didn't get the opportunity to record with a band until 1950. By this time, his sound harsh, heavy, and beat driven was well in place, and blues history was made.

What followed in the years 1951 to 1960 was the greatest collection of electric blues recordings ever made. Waters originals like "Long Distance Call," "Mannish Boy" (108 k, 10 sec.),"Got My Mojo Working," "She Moves Me," and "She's Nineteen Years Old" were supplemented by the songs Willie Dixon had given to him: "Hoochie Coochie Man," "I Just Want to Make Love to You," and "I'm Ready," among others. These records defined the Chicago blues sound during its classic period. Though Waters had all but quit playing guitar at this point-his voice, thick and rough, gave the recordings and his live performances their incredible power.

Chess Records released Waters' debut album in 1958. Called The Best of Muddy Waters, it was a collection of his hit singles. That same year, Waters and his pianist, Otis Spann, toured England. The tour opened up a new audience for Waters abroad-and at home. White folk fans fascinated with the blues heard about Waters' triumph in England and sought out his records. For his next album Waters interpreted a collection of Big Bill Broonzy songs to take advantage of this new audience that seemed to prefer rural-flavored acoustic blues to the riveting electric style Waters had perfected in the '50s.

Yet it was Waters' electric band that transformed the Newport Folk Festival into a romping blues bash in 1960. Waters and his band were at their best as they worked their way through a feverish set on the Newport stage. Later that year Chess released the live album Muddy Waters at Newport, and those new blues fans not at the fest found ample cause to seek out electric blues.

Yet Chess continued to push Waters as a folk-blues artist to capitalize on the continuing interest of white fans in down-home blues. The album Folk Singer was released in 1964. The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues, both of which contained old recordings, followed. To balance out Waters' catalog, Chess released the soulish Muddy, Brass, and the Blues in 1966, a deserved failure. A number of late-'60s and early-'70s albums, especially Fathers and Sons, They Call Me Muddy Waters (which won a Grammy for best ethnic/traditional recording in 1971), and The London Muddy Waters Sessions (which featured Waters jamming with English blues-rockers like Rory Gallagher) sold almost exclusively to white record buyers.

In the 1970s Waters toured almost constantly, playing all over the world. By 1977 he had ended his long-standing relationship with Chess and signed with CBS/Blue Sky. Collaborating with producer-guitarist Johnny Winter, Waters enjoyed a resurgence of his recording career with the album Hard Again in 1977, which won Waters his second Grammy and featured some of his most inspired studio work since the early '60s. The 1978 follow-up album, I'm Ready, was also a critical and commercial success; like its predecessor, I'm Ready featured re-workings of some of Waters' classic songs fueled with new energy and drive. A tour of the U.S. included a special performance at the White House for President Jimmy Carter and his staff, and a memorable rendition of "Mannish Boy" captured in the Band's farewell concert film, The Last Waltz.

Waters' final two albums, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live and King Bee, were also produced by Winter, whose devotion to Waters was unwavering. Waters and Winter often performed together in the early '80s, playing mostly to white blues and rock fans who often came to his shows to pay respect.

Waters died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1983 at age sixty-eight. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

"Mannish Boy" is from Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live Copyright © CBS Records Inc.,1979.

Music/Discography

The Muddy Sound Described By Bob Margolin

Muddy Waters is not more widely credited with being a great slide guitar player only because his singing, his legendary position in the Blues World, and his charisma are pretty distracting. But his slide guitar playing was so powerful that he could never be upstaged, even by other guitar players whom we consider to be great. Muddy's early Delta Blues mostly open-tuning slide guitar was influenced by Son House and Robert Johnson.

He took Chicago by storm in the late '40s when he played it on the "modern" innovation, the electric guitar, with a small band. Using a small amplifier turned up to where the notes would distort in vocal-like ways, sometimes smooth, sometimes raucous, Muddy's slide guitar provided solid rhythm, answered his singing, and took slashing powerful solos.

In the '50s, Muddy began to play his guitar more often in conventional tuning, but continued to play slide, much in the guitar styles of Tampa Red and Robert Nighthawk. As with his voice, Muddy would slide up and down to notes, and use a range of wide or narrow vibrato, to make his slide notes sing. The trademark electric slide solo that he played on many of his slow blues songs was guaranteed to drive his audiences crazy. You could spend the rest of your life digging the subtleties and emotion and rhythm and surprises in Muddy Waters' slide guitar playing, and you'd never get to the bottom.
-BOB MARGOLIN

Bob Margolin spent many years in Muddy's touring band and has become a successful solo artist and journalist.

For more information on Bob Margolin contact: Bonnie Tallman, BC Productions (570) 584 4480 or Alligator Records www.alligator.com

Muddy's Very Extensive Song List

http://www.muddywaters.com/songlist.html

The Koolman's Award List

http://www.muddywaters.com/awards.html

Past Tour Dates

http://www.muddywaters.com/tour.html

Movies - TV - Commercials - Videos

http://www.muddywaters.com/media.html

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