Today is Muddy Waters's 106th birthday anniversary. Born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1913, Muddy was raised on the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to Chicago in 1943. While working a day shift at a paper mill that made containers, he made gradual inroads on the Chicago music scene where established figures like Big Bill Broonzy began to spread his name around, and as Muddy said, "word began to leak out that they had a pretty good blues singer here from Mississippi." Three years after his arrival, he recorded an unreleased session for Columbia, and in 1947 made his debut on Aristocrat, the first label operated by Leonard and Phil Chess. The following year, after persuading Leonard to let him play amplified guitar on a session (as he was on live dates at South Side blues joints), he introduced a blazing new sound with his 1948 release, "I Can't Be Satisfied/Feel Like Going Home," that gave an urbanized, electric jolt to the Delta blues and set the standard for modern Chicago blues.
Here's Muddy on a 1966 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation special with his great band featuring Otis Spann, James Cotton, guitarist Pee Wee Madison, bassist Jimmy Lee Morris, and drummer S.P. Leary.
"You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had" is still the pithiest and most ironic way I've ever heard of describing the virtue of being broke. Here it's underscored by Muddy's powerful singing and slide guitar, Spann's piano (which was the lead voice on the song's Chess release in 1964), and Cotton's harmonica, which punctuates Muddy's lines with its huge tone and warbling effects. I don't know of any more detailed and up-close footage of a harp player in action.
I first saw Muddy in 1971, and numerous times thereafter, but despite the excellence of every set I ever saw him play, he continually fostered the idea in interviews that his best days were behind him, that his golden age was the 1950s and '60s when his bands still included Spann, who'd joined in 1953, and Cotton in 1956. So when I first saw this film on a grainy VHS in 1987, it was like discovering a Holy Grail of blues. While Muddy's career in Chicago had been in full swing since the mid-1940s, this and his appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 were his earliest filmed performances, and the CBC session (excuse the super-imposed intros that were added in 1996) offers the most intimate view I've seen of his high cheek-boned face and beautiful skin tones, and the most vivid in capturing how fully engaged Muddy's whole being was in delivering what he liked to call the "real deep blues" that he brought from the Delta, electrified in Chicago, and gave to the world. His CBC set ended with his traditional set and concert closer, "Got My Mojo Working."