Life on the Mississippi book review: Muddy Waters - Going Down Slow

gravityworld.tv In August of 1981, when the undisputed king of Chicago blues headlined ChicagoFest — then the Windy City's top outdoor music festival — for two nights, his loyal subjects mobbed Navy Pier on the lakefront to hear one of the greatest innovators the idiom had ever produced. Muddy Waters led the charge in the late 1940s and early '50s to electrify Delta blues in an urban setting. His peerless combo would include such future stars as ace guitarist Jimmy Rogers, harmonica virtuoso Little Walter and piano wizard Otis Spann. But Muddy was always at the center of the action. His gruff, authoritative vocal delivery and slashing slide guitar define the purest form of postwar Chicago blues. Waters' charisma was as immense as his musical vision. Born April 4, 1915, in Issaquena County, Mississippi, McKinley Morganfield learned the blues while sharecropping on Stovall Plantation. One guitarist particularly influenced him. "I never seen a man could play at that time as good as Son House, to me. With that big voice he had, he could sing," said Muddy. "He was preachin' the blues then, and I thought he was the best in the world." In late August of 1941 musicologists Alan Lomax and John Work rolled into Coahoma County in search of rural gospel and blues talent. They made field recordings of Muddy, with Lomax returning the next year to cut more. But those were for the Library of Congress. It was only after Muddy migrated north in 1943 that he pursued a career as a ...