Muddy Waters

by Sandra B. Tooze

Born in a sharecropper's shack on a Mississippi plantation, McKinley Morganfield - later renowned as Muddy Waters - would forge a career as a bluesman who would conquer the world. Revered as a titan of the blues and beloved as a man, Muddy's struggle from the cotton fields to international acclaim is one man's extraordinary story, but it also encompasses the history of popular music. Battling to survive within the deprivation and subjugation of the segregated South, Muddy stubbornly clung to his belief that one day he would make the world take note. Influenced by blues giants Son House and Robert Johnson, he constructed his first guitar out of a box and a stick and went on to rock the local juke joints with his brand of searing slide guitar and powerhouse vocals. In 1943 Muddy boarded the Illinois Central for the promise of Chicago. Amid the poverty and violence of the South Side ghetto, Muddy's brand of acoustic country blues seemed out of sync with the brash vitality of postwar urban