End Page: Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield, 1913-1983, helped create the music we love so much. Let's take a look at his life and his final resting place.

End Page is an occasional Low Down and Dirty feature looking at the final resting places of some of rock and blues’ brightest lights. We’re gonna start with the king of it all, Muddy Waters. Please subscribe to Low, Down and Dirty, free or paid, and share!

Photo by Kirk West/Retro Photo Archives

• Muddy Waters, [Probably] April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983

“Muddy Waters might have been the most magnificent of all the bluesmen to come out of Mississippi,” B.B. King wrote in his autobiography, Blues All Around Me. “No one else had Muddy’s authority. He was the boss of Chicago and the reason some call it the home of the blues.”

Waters was born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1935, in Mississippi, more or less. As his Wikipedia entry notes, “Muddy Waters' place and date of birth are not conclusively known. He stated that he was born in 1915 at Rolling Fork in Sharkey County, Mississippi, but other evidence suggests that he was born in the unincorporated community of Jug's Corner, in neighboring Issaquena County, in 1913.” He grew up on the Stovall Plantation and moved to the Windy City in 1943. When he bought an electric guitar and kept right on playing his rough and raw, Son House-style Delta slide style, Waters helped transform deep, acoustic Mississippi Delta blues into a hard-edged, urban music. His mid-fifties move to a backbeat dramatically changed the course of music history, and the sides he cut for Chess Records from 1948 to ’63 drafted the blueprint for Chicago blues. They will forever stand as landmark American recordings, music of rare subtlety and power.

Waters was a massive influence on both his fellow blues players and young rock and rollers, his impact rivaled only by the mighty Howlin’ Wolf. It as not a coincidence that the Rolling Stones named themselves after a line from a Waters song. His career sputtered a bit in the mid-70s on a commercial level, but his power remained undimmed and he played phenomenal shows with excellent bands all around the world.

As guitarist Bob Margolin, who toured with Muddy for years, wrote, “As we walked through airports together, people would stop and just gawk at Muddy Waters. I could almost hear their thought behind their open-mouthed stares: ‘He MUST be SOMEONE…’ Most did not recognize him as a Blues legend, for most people Blues music is not even in their world. But Magnetic Mud’s dignity and depth were abundantly obvious in his music and in person.”

In his later years, Muddy reaped some of the seeds of his sowing, basking in the adulation of young admirers and settling into the role of blues Buddha. Muddy remained a magnificent performer until the end, as documented by four great albums cut with Johnny Winter from 1976-80, who helped return the spotlight where it rightfully belonged. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Muddy Waters Waters died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1983 and is buried at Restvale Cemetery in Worth, Illinois.

Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third straight book to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.