Muddy Waters

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Essential Albums

  • The Real Folk Blues
    The Real Folk Blues
    The Real Folk Blues

    Using a name like The Real Folk Blues for a Muddy Waters album is a little like calling an apple a round, crunchy banana: They’re both fruit—but getting one when you were thinking about the other would throw you for a loop. By the time this compilation of early singles was released in 1965, Waters was known as more than just an electric player. His music had also marked a path away from the starkness of early country blues, and toward something more cosmopolitan and extroverted. It was a shift that reflected the Great Migration of Black Americans from the Deep South toward northern cities—and a shift that helped solidify blues as the bridge to what the world by then knew as rock ’n’ roll. And, boy—the music on The Real Folk Blues makes you want to live in all the rude, earthy ways the gift of life allows. In Waters’ world, you become cursed at childhood (“Gypsy Woman”); watch your house burn (“You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had”); and go with a girl because she carries a knife (“Walkin’ Thru the Park”). And you love every minute of it. Therein lies the paradox of good blues: It talks a lot about feeling bad, but it tends to make you feel anything but.

  • Folk Singer
    Folk Singer
    Folk Singer

    Folk Singer is like a good mystery: What’s on the page might draw you in, but it’s what isn’t that keeps you going. Released in 1964, Folk Singer marked Muddy Waters’ first all-acoustic album—an experiment, in part, in trying to market him to a broader, whiter audience. While his early music released the energy that helped form rock ’n’ roll, Folk Singer was subtle and restrained, an exercise in negative space. You never sense him swinging for the fences or pouring it all out. If anything, the album’s most dramatic moments are its quietest ones (“My Captain,” “Long Distance,” “Country Boy”). And even when the music picks up—“Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”—the mood has a spectral quality more redolent of country blues than of Waters’ electric strut. He says he’s after the schoolgirl—but it sounds like he’s singing to the moon. At the time he recorded Folk Singer, Waters was riding a wave of interest, thanks in part to artists like The Rolling Stones and Cream, who’d helped repurpose electric blues as something like pop. At the same time, promoters and record labels were trying to market artists like Waters not just as entertainers, but as stewards of a unique American tradition that, like jazz, deserved serious attention and institutional respect. The subtext here was clear: Blues was Black and low-class. But an album like Folk Singer, especially in the era of Bob Dylan, was a figure of cultural repute. Four years earlier, Waters’ label had gone so far as to photograph him holding an acoustic guitar for the cover of his live album At Newport 1960—even though he’d played an electric one at the show. Folk Singer not only accepted the gambit and beat the odds, but stands as one of the more singular blues albums of the post rock ’n’ roll era. Good poets know that words matter—but so do the spaces in between.

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About Muddy Waters

The father of the modern Chicago blues, Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morganfield) electrified the traditional sounds of the Delta as he cleared a path for rock ’n’ roll. ∙ At age 17, he sold a horse to buy his first guitar and rapidly earned a reputation as the best player in his region of the Mississippi Delta. ∙ Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded Waters for the first time in 1941 and 1942—sessions later released as The Complete Plantation Recordings, which went on to win a Grammy Award. ∙ “Louisiana Blues,” released in 1950, was the first of his 13 Top 10 Blues singles, which include such classics as “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy.” ∙ His Newport Jazz Festival concert, released as At Newport 1960, exposed Chicago blues to a new audience and is ranked among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. ∙ In 1964, The Rolling Stones, who had taken their name from a Waters track, went on a pilgrimage to Chess Records, his label, to meet their hero and record a few sides at Chess’ studio. ∙ Between 1972 and 1980, he won a record-setting six Grammy Awards for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording. ∙ In the ’80s, Waters was inducted into both the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and (posthumously) the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. ∙ Rolling Stone ranked him No. 17 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

HOMETOWN
Rolling Fork, MS, United States
BORN
April 4, 1915
GENRE
Blues

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