I finally made my first visit to the Mississippi Delta three summers ago. We stayed three days in Clarksdale and made the trip out to the old Stovall plantation. We visited the spot where Muddy Waters’ sharecropping cabin had once stood. That humble structure had been moved to the Delta Blues Museum, but it was still an experience to stand on that spot, look across the road to the huge fields in the distance, and imagine McKinley Morganfield on a summer evening after a long day in those furrows, working on his slide guitar playing and beginning his transformation into Muddy Waters, international godfather of the blues.
Like a lot of guys my age, my first blues record was a Paul Butterfield album. Soon after I bought the album “Fathers and Sons,” on which had Paul backed up Muddy. The very next day I was back in the record store to get “The Best of Muddy Waters,” and I just wore that thing out. Muddy was the gate to the blues for me. He quickly led me to Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—the whole historical blues genius lineup was rolled out for me by Muddy Waters. He changed my life before I ever saw him in person.
From 1968 on I saw Muddy onstage many times. The first time was at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle—that was the first time I saw Paul Oscher in action, too. I’ll never forget Muddy’s Academy-Award enactment of every ounce of drama in “Long Distance Call” that night. I saw him at Ungano’s in New York City two years later, just after his terrible automobile accident—he apologized for sitting down. There was an improbable week-long gig at the posh Maisonette Room at the St. Regis Hotel, where Muddy gamely asked out for requests and a blue-haired matron cradling a martini called out for “When The Saints Go Marching In.” That spurred my friends and I into action, and we began shouting out for all of Muddy’s hits, which he delivered up to us. The great Louis Myers played guitar on that show. There was the time a bunch of us drove from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie to catch a Muddy Waters show at Vassar. We stood outside afterwards and waved goodbye to Muddy and the band as they pulled out of the parking lot in a weathered station wagon and pulling a small trainer with their equipment. I caught Muddy twice at Antone’s, where Jimmie Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, and Kim Wilson sat in and delighted him. I even got to open for him once, at a show at the Showbox in Seattle.
Onstage, Muddy looked like a king, carried himself like a king, sang like a king, and played like a king. Thirty years after making the move to Chicago as an illiterate field hand and creating a new, amplified update of the Delta blues, Muddy was traveling the globe and delivering one great show after another in country after country, and no one who saw him will forget his regal nature, his total command of the stage, and the intensity and uniqueness of his music. Muddy Waters traveled a personal journey that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend, but we can spend the rest of our lives savoring the gift he left behind—some of the most beautiful and most soulful music ever recorded.
