Down Home and Dirty

Muddy Waters is the king of dirty blues, down-home blues, funky blues or straight blues--most properly known as Delta or country blues. Along with such other black masters of this unique American art form as B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf, Muddy is riding the crest of a surprisingly long-lived blues revival. Of them all, he remains the purest, the most loyal to where he has been and what it has cost him. Muddy's brand of Delta blues is supposed to follow the traditional twelve-bar structure, but as often as not uses eleven or 13 bars. Despite its metric uncertainty, it is a two-beat, shuffling kind of music that seems to have been drilled into the central nervous systems of Muddy and his six sidemen.

On the stand last week at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, gathered around a silver and red loudspeaker bank inscribed BLUES POWER, Muddy and his men played with a controlled exuberance that suggested disciplined violence. The band was as tight as one of the strings on his slide guitar. Muddy sang in a trombone-like baritone that was as true as his middle-aged stomach is flat:

Whisky, you ain't no good. I declare I'm through with you. You done taken all of my money, Now you done taken my woman, too.

Muddy is through with whisky these days, but not because of any woman. Five years ago, during an engagement in Detroit, he developed a nosebleed that would not quit for a week. A doctor attributed it to high blood pressure and also suggested Muddy cut down on his drinking. Now when he, his sidemen and guests get thirsty backstage, Muddy uncorks half a dozen or so bottles of champagne. He can afford it. Muddy won't say exactly how much he earns on a gig, but there are plenty of gigs these days, and his 1970 income was close to six figures.

Getting On. That is a decided improvement over the days when, at the age of 13, he was blowing harmonica and singing for the Saturday night fish fries in Clarksdale, Miss. "I was making about 50-c- a night, a fish sandwich and half a pint of moonshine, and I was getting on," he recalls. Muddy was born McKinley Morganfield, 56 years ago. His mother died young, so his father sent him to be raised by his grandmother. "She used to say I'd sneak out and play in the mud when I was little, so she started calling me 'Muddy,' " he told TIME Correspondent Joe Boyce. "The kids added 'Waters.' Tt was a 'sling' [meaning slang] name, and it just stuck."

At 17, he began to play guitar, imitating the choked "bottleneck" style of two older, semilegendary primitives, Eddie "Son" House and Robert Johnson. Around 1941, Folk Archivist Alan Lomax came to Clarksdale and recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress. That helped convince Muddy that he might be able to make it up North, where the factories had work, and a job was not called off if it rained. As Muddy once put it: "I came up to Chicago on a train. Alone. With a suitcase, one suit of clothes and a guitar."

In Chicago's South Side ghetto, where Muddy still lives, he began performing at Saturday night parties and in the smoky gin mills that catered to black-collar workers who liked their booze and blues straight. It was not so much that they went to the Zanzibar or the 708 Club to get away from it all, but to get back to it all. From Muddy and his songs came evocations of the sexual passion, the burning sun in the fields, the moonshine and the familiar life of the Delta.

Jumpy Stuff. Muddy became so popular that his price shot up from $5 a night to $18, with $10 thrown in for the sidemen. In 1947 he signed up with what is now Chicago's Chess Records, for whom he has recorded such blues classics as Got My Mojo W orkin', Long Distance Call and Tiger in Your Tank. In 1954 came Rollin' Stone, a number that later inspired Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and gave both an English rock group and an American rock magazine their names. From listening to Muddy's records, the late Jimi Hendrix taught himself to play guitar.

Until the mid-1950s, the music of Muddy and his fellow bluesmen was marketed as "race music" aimed almost exclusively at black communities. Today his new audience is largely young whites; Muddy now makes 20 to 30 college appearances a year, and he plays mostly in white clubs and theaters. For one thing, says Muddy, young whites are more responsive. "The blacks are more interested in the jumpy stuff. The whites want to hear me for what I am." It does not even bother him that white rock groups like the Stones have made a lot of money by recording his songs. "I don't ever give it a thought," he says. "If they had never started taking my stuff, I don't know that I could have moved up financially. Sure they made more money than I did. So what? I'm just glad I did my thing."

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