In 1941 Alan Lomax went into the Delta to record American folk music for the Smithsonian Institute. He also wanted to find Robert Johnson, but learned that Johnson had already  died.
Instead he found Muddy Waters.

Muddy Waters áka McKinley Morganfield was born on April 4th, 1915 at Rolling Fork, Mississippi. His mother died when he was three, and he was sent to live with his grandmother at Stovall’s Plantation, outside Clarksdale. 
When Lomax came, he was already 26. He had a string band and was a famous blues musician among the locals.
 
Lomax recalled the first meeting for his recording session:
Muddy’s style so impressed me that I recorded his two finest blues twice, and later included both of these blues in the first set of records published by the Library of Congress. This compilation remained to present the finest things we had found in our survey of the whole country.
...
Muddy’s song departed from the rigid AAB, three-line blues formula most of his contemporaries used. Instead, Muddy was rhyming variations on the four-phrase song form ABAB in outline (Lomax, 407).
(Note that this is also the formula for Rock’n Roll.)
The two songs Lomax recorded in 41, were "Country Blues," which was an adaptation of Johnson’s or Son House’s "Walking Blues" and "I be’s troubled", which later became "I can't be satisfied".

Next year, Lomax recorded him again, and the year after, in 1943, Muddy was on his way to Chicago. There he was helped by Broonzy, who had the reputation, to help all the young Blues musicans and he soon played the acoustic guitar behind John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson.

Apart from the music, he worked as a truck driver, as during WW II jobs were again easy to find in Chicago.
The year after he bought an electric guitar and by and by he nearly single-handedly transformed Chicago Blues style. 
His first record was "I can’t be satisfied," - already played with the electric guitar.

What then followed during the 50’s and 60’s was one hit after another. Electric Blues was louder, more agressive and far mor self-confident than Folk Blues was.

Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley and of course Muddy Waters dominated the Chicago Blues scene with songs like "Mannish Boy" or "Hootchie Coochie Man."

From there it was just a small step to Rock'n Roll.

Muddy Waters with his first record


 
Go back to: Index
Go to: The Blues Brothers