Recommendations of the Editorial team
Muddy opened for ZZ Top in 1981. That was 40 years after his first recordings, but this band still had the blues. Not like seasoned professionals, but with the same enthusiasm as in Muddy’s early days. When he sang “Got My Mojo Working” you could feel that his mojo was indeed still working well. He was content, he maintained his composure, he was self-sufficient. If he had an opinion on a subject, it was difficult to dissuade him.
Muddy Waters – “Got My Mojo Working”:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young musicians suddenly said that they had to go back to the authentic sounds of the 1950s, and everyone was paying exorbitant prices for guitars from that era. Muddy Waters was constantly asked how he got his sound and what instruments they played back then.
His answer was usually, “Anything we could afford.” He told us a story about Walter “Shakey” Horton, who worked at a taxi dispatch office with a friend.
A stolen taxi radio microphone
One time, at the end of the shift, they took a pair of pliers and cut off the microphone so they had something to amplify the harmonica with.
There you have the authentic sound of the blues – a stolen taxi radio microphone.
His sound is always described as raw and dirty, but it wasn’t particularly loud. It just sounded like that. A guitar amplifier in the fifties was barely bigger than a radio. To cut through the noise of a party, you had to turn it up to full volume. And thus left the clean-sounding realm of electronic circuits and entered the land of distortion that made everything so much deeper. If you didn’t have a big band with 20 musicians, then you just needed 20 watts.
Most of my generation discovered Muddy backwards, so to speak, through the Rolling Stones, who took their name from one of his songs.
The slide guitar captured the nuances of the human voice better than any other instrument
I heard it right before the Stones came over, but it doesn’t matter whether you spot it backwards, from the front or from the side. In any case, I started playing guitar not least because of Muddy. He started out in Mississippi on acoustic, using his thumb for the bass lines and a bottleneck for the upper string melodies.
The slide guitar captured the nuances of the human voice better than any other instrument. It was basically a Robert Johnson thing, and Muddy brought it to Chicago, powered it up, added bass, harmonica and a good backbeat and the party was ready.
You can hear his enthusiasm in bands like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. And his first album, “The Best Of Muddy Waters” with all the Chess singles on it, I can only recommend that to everyone. “Honey Bee”, “Rollin’ Stone” na Blues”, “She Moves Me” – every track is worth something. The albums Johnny Winter produced in the late ’70s are also great, “Hard Again” and “I’m Ready.” Johnny understood the music and captured the space of the early 50s.
This music was never intended to be something long-lasting. Just noise on a shellac disc. Now it’s the 21st century and we’re still puzzling over how such a simple art form could be so complicated and subtle. Muddy made three chords sound profound. And that’s what they are.