Waters, Muddy (1915–1983)

US blues musician. One of the last of the great country blues singers and one of the first major players of modern Chicago blues, he was raised on the Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he began playing harmonica and guitar while working as a sharecropper. In 1950 he gained his first national success with ‘Rolling Stone’, the first release of Chess Records, the rhythm-and-blues label with which his name was linked for the next 25 years. In 1952 he made his first recordings with his six-piece combo, which pioneered the electronically amplified Chicago blues style. Featuring Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, and Otis Spann, this group released several rhythm-and-blues hits, including ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and ‘Got My Mojo Working’, and toured extensively on the black nightclub circuit throughout the 1950s.

Muddy Waters was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. In 1941–42, he was recorded by Alan Lomax, the folklorist of the Library of Congress, and, encouraged by this experience, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1943 to seek a career in music. Over the next several years, he gradually developed an ensemble blues style while performing in neighbourhood bars in Chicago's South Side ghetto. In 1946 he recorded an unreleased session for Columbia Records, and for the next three years he recorded in a country blues style for Aristocrat Records. He made the first of several annual tours of England in 1958, during which he became a major influence on the early British rock scene. He appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, and was a central figure in the folk-blues revival of the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s, his songs were widely covered in rock; several headlining performers, including the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, featured him on their tours. He was a regular Grammy winner throughout the 1970s, and his appearance in The Band's farewell concert, filmed as The Last Waltz (1978), was widely acclaimed. He was given a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.