7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

Muddy Waters

(b. April 4, 1915, Rolling Fork, Miss., U.S.—d. April 30, 1983,

Westmont, Ill.)

D

ynamic American blues guitarist and singer McKinley

Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, played a

major role in creating the post–World War II electric blues.

Waters, whose nickname came from his proclivity for

playing in a creek as a boy, grew up in the cotton country

of the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised principally

by his grandmother on the Stovall plantation near

Clarksdale, Miss. He taught himself to play harmonica as

a child and took up guitar at age 17. He eagerly absorbed

the classic Delta blues styles of Robert Johnson, Son

House, and others while developing a style of his own. As

a young man, he drove a tractor on the sharecropped

plantation, and on weekends he operated the cabin in

which he lived as a “juke house,” where visitors could party

and imbibe moonshine whiskey made by Waters. He per-

formed both on his own and in a band, occasionally earning

a little money playing at house parties. He was first

recorded in 1941, for the U.S. Library of Congress by

archivist Alan Lomax, who had come to Mississippi in

search of Johnson (who had already died by that time).

In 1943 Waters—like millions of other African Americans

in the South who moved to cities in the North and West

during the Great Migration from 1916 to 1970—relocated

to Chicago. There he began playing clubs and bars on the

city’s South and West sides while earning a living working

in a paper mill and later driving a truck. In 1944 he bought

his first electric guitar, which cut more easily through the

noise of crowded bars. He soon broke with country blues

by playing electric guitar in a shimmering slide style. In 1946

pianist Sunnyland Slim, another Delta native, helped Waters

land a contract with Aristocrat Records, for which he made