Muddy Waters's House

Muddy Waters lived most of his first thirty years in a house on the Stovall Plantation, where he moved with his grandmother from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, about 1915 and remained based until leaving for Chicago in 1943. African American music on the plantation had been documented as early as 1901, and in August 1941 Alan Lomax and John Work, on a Library of Congress and Fisk University field recording expedition, recorded Muddy Waters and other local musicians in his house; Lomax returned with Lewis Jones in 1942 for a second series. Waters, later known as the king of Chicago blues, used the house as a juke joint for field hands and also played at social functions for the Stovalls. Two of his recorded songs, "Burr Clover Farm Blues" and "Burr Clover Blues," paid tribute to Colonel William Howard Stovall and his crop; Stovall, from a successful Delta cotton-farming family, had invented the burr clover seed harvester in 1935, and Waters said he wrote "Burr Clover Blues" at Stovall's request. The plantation was also associated with other musicians, including fiddler Henry "Son" Simms, Waters' cousin the Reverend Wilie Morganfield, blues singer-pianist Eddie Boyd, and bassist David "Pecan" Porter, who later lived in the same house. After the house stood vacant and deteriorated, tourists began visiting it in the 1980s, and in 1996 the restored house was placed on display at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.

Mississippi · United States