Hootchie Cootchie Man: Muddy Waters 'Shaped Our Culture' More Than Any Other Blues Figure

Muddy Waters was 28 in 1941 when Alan Lomax found him on the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi, about six miles northwest of Clarksdale. Muddy feared the white man was a government revenue agent looking for Muddy's whisky stills. Lomax claimed he was there to record Muddy for the Library of Congress. The bluesman's suspicions began to subside when the "revenuer" asked for water and drank out of the same cup Muddy drank out of.

"Same cup I drink out of, he drinks out of it too. I said 'Not a white man doing this!'" His suspicion faded away when Lomax pulled a Martin guitar out of his car and Muddy saw the back seat was filled with recording equipment.

Word got around quickly reaching Muddy's musical partner, Son Sims who hurried to Muddy's house armed with a guitar. Soon his first recording, "Country Blues," was made.

"Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks," Muddy recalled. "I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it. I can do it.'"

More than any other blues figure, Muddy Waters "shaped our culture," Gordon writes. "His song "Rollin' Stone" inspired a band name and a magazine. When Bob Dylan went form acoustic folk music to rock and roll, he hired white musicians who'd learned from Muddy in Chicago. Songs that Muddy wrote or made famous have become mainstream hits when performed by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and plenty of others. These musicians find in Muddy's songs - and convey to others - an honesty about pain. And that is something to which everyone can relate. Everybody hurts, sometime."