Muddy Waters born 4 April 1915

McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1915* – April 30, 1983), known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-war blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude". 

McKinley (Muddy Waters) Morganfield was born in Rolling Fork, in the southern Mississippi Delta near Highway 61. His father, Ollie Morganfield, farmed and played blues guitar, but his parents separated when he was six months old and he went to live with his maternal grandmother on a plantation outside Clarksdale, Miss., a town in the central Delta where John Lee Hooker and other future blues and gospel stars grew up. His grandmother began calling him "Muddy" when he was a baby because he liked playing in the mud, and when he was a child on the plantation playmates added the surname "Waters." 

Muddy Waters began making music when he was 3 or 4 years old. He began performing on harmonica at country picnics and fish fries when he was 12 or 13, and had plenty of opportunity to watch older blues singers and guitarists. Robert Johnson influenced him, and so did the impassioned singer-guitarist Son House. But he also listened to commercial blues recordings by Memphis Minnie, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, and Blind Lemon Jefferson on a neighbor's phonograph. 

In 1941 and 1942, Alan Lomax and John Work recorded Mr. Waters in Mississippi for the Library of Congress. Hearing himself on records encouraged Mr. Waters to try to make commercial recordings, and in 1943 he moved to Chicago. The following year he acquired an electric guitar, and by 1948 his band, with Jimmy Rogers on second guitar, Little Walter on harmonica, and Baby Face Leroy on guitar and drums, was the most popular blues combo working on Chicago's black South Side. He recorded for Columbia records and for Aristocrat in 1948, and his recording career took off after Aristocrat, owned by Leonard and Phil Chess, became Chess Records, with Muddy Waters as its leading blues artist. 

In the early and middle 1950's, Muddy Waters and his band made a number of records popular with black record buyers, especially in the Deep South and in Middle Western cities with large populations of Southerners, like Chicago and Detroit.  The songs Mr. Waters recorded and performed in the 1950's included "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Just Make Love To Me," "She Moves Me," "Mannish Boy," and "Louisiana Blues." His songs, some of which were original while others came from the blues tradition or were written for him by Willie Dixon, are still in the repertories of countless blues and rhythm-and-blues bands in the United States and around the world. 

                             

Waters played his blues at Carnegie Hall in 1959, and in 1960 he made a triumphant appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he introduced his blues hit "Got My Mojo Working" to white music fans. His music was widely imitated by a generation of young white musicians, and virtually all the leading rock guitarists who emerged in the 1960's, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Johnny Winter, named Muddy Waters as one of their earliest and most important influences. Waters also capitalized on the folk-music craze of the late Fifties and early Sixties with a series of albums that found him playing acoustic blues on such albums as Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill (a tribute to rural bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, released in 1960), Muddy Waters, Folk Singer (1964) and The Real Folk Blues (1966). 

 Less successful were attempts to contemporize his sound with such ill-advised efforts as “Muddy Waters Twist” (a 1962 single) and Electric Mud (an album of psychedelic blues from 1968). Even more satisfying were a couple of albums - Fathers and Sons (1969) and The London Muddy Waters Sessions (1972) - that found Waters accompanied by such vanguard rock musicians as Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton. His thirty-year tenure with Chess Records ended in 1976 with the release of The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. From here, he moved to the Blue Sky label (a Columbia subsidiary). 

He received widespread recognition in the 1970's, including six Grammy awards and a dynamic featured performance in Martin Scorcese's 1978 film "The Last Waltz,"a film documentary of The Band’s farewell concert. Water’s scalding rendition of “Mannish Boy” - on which he was accompanied by The Band and Paul Butterfield on harmonica - was an unforgettable highlight. Subsequent to that, he kept the momentum going with a series of uncompromising albums for Blue Sky that were produced by long-time fan Johnny Winter. All were critical and popular successes. 

Waters, who remained active till the end, died of a heart attack at his home in Westmont Illanois on  April 30, 1983. He was 68 years old. In the years since his death, the one-room cedar shack in which he lived on the Stovall Plantation has been preserved as a memorial to Waters’ humble origins. 

(Edited from New York Times and rockhall.com) (*some sources give 1913 as birth year)