Muddy Waters - 1977-05-14 1839 Theater, San Francisco, Ca. (Remastered, Live On Broadcasting) '2025

Tracks list

	Tracklist:

1. Chicken Shack (Live) (02:42)
2. Instrumental (Live) (08:46)
3. Intro Muddy Waters (Live) (02:13)
4. The Blues Had A Baby (Live) (06:18)
5. Hoochie Coochie Man (Live) (03:11)
6. County Jail (Live) (06:24)
7. Everything Gonna Be Alright (Live) (04:44)
8. Howlin_ Wolf (Live) (07:17)
9. Kansas City (Live) (08:50)
10. Got My Mojo Working (Live) (09:43)


 moreWaters was born McKinley Morganfield, and historians argue about some
details of his early life; while he often told reporters he was born in Rolling
Fork, Mississippi on April 4, 1915, researchers have uncovered census records
and personal documents that would pin the year of his birth at 1913 or 1914, and
others have cited the place of his birth as Jug's Corner, a town in
Mississippi's Issaquena County. What is certain is that Morganfield's mother
died when he just three years old, and from then on he was raised on the Stovall
Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi by his grandmother, Della Grant. Grant is
said to have given young Morganfield the nickname "Muddy" because he liked to
play in the mud as a boy, and the name stuck, with "Water" and "Waters" being
tacked on a few years later. The rural South was a hotbed for the blues in the
'20s and ‘30s, and young Muddy became entranced with the music when he
discovered a neighbor had a phonograph and records by the likes of Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red.

As Muddy became more deeply immersed in the blues, he took up the harmonica; he
was performing locally at parties and fish fries by the age of 13, sometimes
with guitarist Scott Bohanner, who lived and worked in Stovall. In his early
teens, Muddy was introduced to the sound of contemporary Delta blues artists,
such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton; their music inspired
Waters to switch instruments, and he bought a guitar when he was 17, learning to
play in the bottleneck style. Within a few years, he was performing on his own
and with a local string band, the Son Simms Four; he also opened a juke joint on
the Stovall grounds, where fellow sharecroppers could listen to music, enjoy a
drink or a snack, and gamble. Waters became a fixture in Mississippi, performing
with the likes of Big Joe Williams and Robert Nighthawk, and in the late summer
of 1941, musical archivists Alan Lomax and John Work III arrived in Mississippi
with a portable recording rig, eager to document local blues talent for the
Library of Congress (it's said they were hoping to locate Robert Johnson, only
to learn he had died three years earlier). Lomax and Work were strongly
impressed with Waters, and recorded several sides of him performing in his juke
joint; two of the songs were released as a 78, and when Waters received two
copies of the single and $20 from Lomax, it encouraged him to seriously consider
a professional career. In July 1943, Lomax returned to record more material with
Waters; these early sessions with Lomax were collected on the album Down On
Stovall's Plantation in 1966, and a 1994 reissue of the material, The Complete
Plantation Recordings, won a Grammy award.

In 1943, Waters decided to pull up stakes and relocate to Chicago, Illinois in
hopes of making a living off his music. (He moved to St. Louis for a spell in
1940, but didn't care for it.) Waters drove a truck and worked at a paper plant
by day, and at night struggled to make a name for himself, playing house parties
and any bar that would have him. Big Bill Broonzy reached out to Waters and
helped him land better gigs; Muddy had recently switched to electric guitar to
be better heard in noisy clubs, which added a new power to his cutting slide
work. By 1946, Waters had come to the attention of Okeh Records, who took him
into the studio to record but chose not to release the results. A session that
same year for 20th Century Records resulted in just one tune being issued as the
B-side of a James "Sweet Lucy" Carter release, but Waters fared better with
Aristocrat Records, a Chicago-based label founded by brothers Leonard and Phil
Chess. The Chess Brothers began recording Waters in 1947, and while a few early
sides with Sunnyland Slim failed to make an impression, his second single for
Aristocrat as a headliner, "I Can't Be Satisfied" b/w "(I Feel Like) Goin'
Home," became a significant hit and launched Waters as a star on the Chicago
blues scene.

Initially, the Chess Brothers recorded Waters with trusted local musicians
(including Earnest "Big" Crawford and Alex Atkins), but for his live work,
Waters had recruited a band which included Little Walter on harmonica, Jimmy
Rogers on guitar, and Baby Face Leroy Foster on drums (later replaced by Elgin
Evans), and in person, Waters and his group earned their reputation as the most
powerful blues band in town, with Waters' passionate vocals and guitar matched
by the force of his combo. By the early '50s, the Chess Brothers (who had
changed the name of their label from Aristocrat to Chess Records in 1950) began
using Waters' stage band in the studio, and Little Walter in particular became a
favorite with blues fans and a superb foil for Waters. Otis Spann joined Waters'
group on piano in 1953, and he would become the anchor for the band well into
the '60s, after Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers had left to pursue solo careers.
In the '50s, Waters released some of the most powerful and influential music in
the history of electric blues, scoring hits with numbers like "Rollin' and
Tumblin,'" "I'm Ready," "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy," "Trouble
No More," "Got My Mojo Working," and "I Just Want to Make Love to You" which
made him a frequent presence on the R&B charts.

By the end of the '50s, while Waters was still making fine music, his career was
going into a slump. The rise of rock & roll had taken the spotlight away from
more traditional blues acts in favor of younger and rowdier acts (ironically,
Waters had headlined some of Alan Freed's early "Moondog" package shows), and
Waters' first tour of England in 1958 was poorly received by many U.K. blues
fans, who were expecting an acoustic set and were startled by the ferocity of
Waters' electric guitar. Waters began playing more acoustic music informed by
his Mississippi Delta heritage in the years that followed, even issuing an album
titled Muddy Waters: Folk Singer in 1964. However, the jolly irony was that
British blues fans would soon rekindle interest in Waters and electric Chicago
blues; as the rise of the British Invasion made the world aware of the U.K. rock
scene, the nascent British blues scene soon followed, and a number of Waters'
U.K. acolytes became international stars, such as Eric Clapton, John Mayall,
Alexis Korner, and a modestly successful London act who named themselves after
Muddy's 1950 hit "Rollin' Stone." While Waters was still leading a fine band
that delivered live (and included the likes of Pinetop Perkins on piano and
James Cotton on harmonica), Chess Records was moving more toward the rock, soul,
and R&B marketplace, and seemed eager to market him to white rock fans, a notion
that reached its nadir in 1968 with Electric Mud, in which Waters was paired up
with a psychedelic rock band (featuring guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch)
for rambling and aimless jams on Waters' blues classics. 1969's Fathers and Sons
was a more inspired variation on this theme, with Waters playing alongside
reverential white blues rockers such as Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield;
1971's The London Muddy Waters Sessions was less impressive, featuring fine
guitar work from Rory Gallagher but uninspired contributions from Steve Winwood,
Rick Grech, and Georgie Fame.

Curiously, while Chess Records helped Waters make some of the finest blues
records of the '50s and ‘60s, it was the label's demise that led to his
creative rebirth. In 1969, the Chess Brothers sold the label to General Recorded
Tape, and the label went through a long, slow commercial decline, finally
folding in 1975. (Waters would become one of several Chess artists who sued the
label for unpaid royalties in its later years.) Johnny Winter, a longtime Waters
fan, heard the blues legend was without a record deal, and was instrumental in
getting Waters signed to Blue Sky Records, a CBS-distributed label that had
become his recording home. Winter produced the sessions for Waters' first Blue
Sky release, and sat in with a band comprised of members of Waters' road band
(including Bob Margolin and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith) along with James Cotton on
harp and Pinetop Perkins on piano. 1977's Hard Again was a triumph, sounding as
raw and forceful as Waters' classic Chess sides, with a couple extra decades of
experience informing his performances, and it was rightly hailed as one of the
finest albums Waters ever made while sparking new interest in his music. (It
also earned him a Grammy award for Best Traditional or Ethnic Folk Recording.)
Waters also dazzled music fans when he appeared at the Band's celebrated
farewell concert on Thanksgiving 1976 at the invitation of Levon Helm, who had
helped produce one of his last Chess releases, The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album.
Muddy delivered a stunning performance of "Mannish Boy" that became one of the
highlights of Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. Between Hard
Again and The Last Waltz, Waters enjoyed a major career boost, and he found
himself touring again for large and enthusiastic crowds, sharing stages with the
likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, and cutting two more well-received
albums with Winter as producer, 1978's I'm Ready and 1981's King Bee, as well as
a solid 1979 concert set, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. Waters' health began
to fail him in 1982, and his final live appearance came in the fall of that
year, when he sang a few songs at an Eric Clapton show in Florida. Waters died
quietly of heart failure at his home in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983.
Since then, both Chicago and Westmont have named streets in Muddy's honor, he's
appeared on a postage stamp, a marker commemorates the site of his childhood
home in Clarksdale, and he appeared as a character in the 2008 film Cadillac
Records, played by Jeffrey Wright. © Mark Deming



Muddy Waters - 1977-05-14 1839 Theater, San Francisco, Ca.rar -  250.3 MB

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