McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, was one of the foremost artists in blues history. In the late 1940s and 1950s he led the transformation of traditional Delta blues into the electric Chicago blues style that helped pave the way to rock 'n' roll. Born in the Jug's Corner community of rural Issaquena County, though he always claimed Rolling Fork as his birthplace, he had a birth date variously cited as April 4, 1913, 1914, or 1915. His grandmother, Della Grant, gave him the nickname “Muddy” because as a baby on the Cottonwood Plantation near Mayersville he loved to play in the mud, and childhood playmates later added “Water” or “Waters.” His father, Ollie Morganfield, was a sharecropper in the Rolling Fork area who also entertained at local blues affairs, but Muddy was raised by his grandmother, who moved to the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale while he was still a young child. His musical influences included Delta musicians such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Robert Nighthawk. He first played harmonica with Stovall guitarist Scott Bohanner, then took up guitar under Bohanner's tutelage, later performed with Big Joe Williams, played in the Son Sims Four, drove a tractor on the Stovall Plantation, and ran a juke joint out of his house there. He made his first recordings at Stovall in 1941-42 for a Library of Congress team led by Alan Lomax and John Work III. After moving to Chicago in 1943, he was setting the pace on the city's competitive blues scene by the end of the decade, as southern farm workers and musicians from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana migrated north. Musicians including Little Walter Jacobs, Otis Spann, and Jimmy Rogers worked in the Muddy Waters Blues Band, which virtually defined the Chicago blues genre. Through recordings on the Aristocrat and Chess labels and through sensual, electrifying live performances, he became both a blues icon and a godfather to generations of rock 'n' roll bands, expanding his audience from African American clubs on Chicago's South and West sides to Europe and beyond. The Rolling Stones recorded several of his songs and took their name from his early record “Rollin' Stone,” and jazz, R&B, country and western, and hip hop artists also used his material. Among his classics, many written by Willie Dixon, were “Got My Mojo Working,” “Manish Boy,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “I'm Ready.” He returned to Mississippi on occasion to visit or perform, appearing at the Greenville V.F.W., the Ole Miss campus, and the 1981 Delta Blues Festival. A recipient of multiple Grammy awards, a charter member of the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame, and a 1987 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Muddy Waters died in his sleep on April 30, 1983, at his home in Westmont, Illinois.
