From: "Dik de Heer" Date: Thu Apr 4, 2002 12:14 am Subject: Born To Be With You : Muddy Waters MUDDY WATERS (By Shaun Mather) Born McKinley Morganfield, 4 April 1915, Rolling Fork, Mississippi Died 30 April 1983, Chicago, Illinois Muddy Waters is one of the giants of the blues. His songs have become a staple diet for nearly every blues group to follow in his wake, and he probably nurtured more blues legends through his own band than anyone else in history. His list of band members reads like a Blues Who's Who - and most of them were unknowns before they hooked up with the Hoochie Coochie Man. Born in rural Mississippi, he was first discovered in 1941 when Alan Lomax recorded him at home in Stovall's Plantation, for the Library of Congress. Lomax returned the following summer and repeated the act. In '43 Waters moved to Chicago where a couple of years later he recorded unsuccessfully for the Columbia label. In 1947 he went with pianist Sunnyland Slim to a session for Aristocrat and after Slim's numbers had been cut, Waters was invited to let rip on Little Anna Mae and Gypsy Woman. The two numbers came out on an Aristocrat 78. With the addition of bass-player Big Crawford, he hit with the dynamic I Feel Like Going Home and I Can't Be Satisfied. The new sound was a fierce merger of the rural delta blues and the heavier city sound of r&b. At the same time that Aristocrat became Chess, so Muddy's band became the premier band in blues, with Jimmy Rogers joining on guitar and the enigmatic wizard Little Walter joining on harmonica. The sound was perfect and they laid down a constant barrage of hot blues, like Rollin' Stone, Hoochie Coochie Man, Just Make Love To Me, I'm Ready, Mannish Boy, Don't Go No Further..... Rock 'n' roll did little to stop his momentum as witnessed by She's Nineteen Years Old, Got My Mojo Working, Tiger In Your Tank..... James Cotton and Otis Spann had joined and were part of the band that took the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival by storm. The '60s saw plenty of mixed experiments, some working (Folk Singer) and some not (Electric Mud). One thing's for sure, he went out on a high, with his Blue Sky albums with Johnny Winter, the first of which, Hard Again, was as tough as Chicago blues ever got. Charly has reissued the complete Chess recordings on a 9-CD box. If that's a bit over the top for you, there are several good single-CD compilations, like "Muddy Waters : His Best 1947 to 1955" (Chess MCD 09370). Recommended reading: Sandra B. Tooze, Muddy Waters - The Mojo Man. Toronto: ECW Press, 1997. Robert Gordon, Can't Be Satisfied : The Life and Times Of Muddy Waters. Boston : Little, Brown, May 2002 Official website: http://www.muddywaters.com/home.html