by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

August 24, 1941: Bluesman Muddy Waters is recorded for the first time, for the Library Of Congress
July 20-24, 1942: More recordings of Muddy Waters are made

People who don’t identify themselves particularly as blues lovers tend to pick B. B. King as their favorite blues artist. Acknowledged blues lovers, however, are more likely to select Muddy Waters than any other blues musician. In 1993, a Muddy Waters album called “The Complete Plantation Recordings” made all of the 1941 and 1942 field recordings of this great blues artist available on one CD.

Field recordings of blues and folk artists have preserved for us the songs and performances of countless artists who never would have been recorded by commercial record companies. Certain names stand out in the area of field recordings, the most famous being John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax. Among many others are John Work, Lawrence Gellert, Zora Neale Hurston, George Mitchell, and Paul Oliver. John Work and the Lomaxes recorded Muddy Waters in August 1941, and several times in July 1942, at the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi, where he worked, and in Clarksdale.

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield, named after President William McKinley, but he was better known by his childhood nickname, Muddy Waters. Young McKinley Morganfield apparently had a fondness for playing in the mud. The earliest recordings of an artist who goes on to become famous are always of interest, and the so-called “plantation recordings” of Muddy Waters are no exception. His was a voice that only someone who grew up with the blues vernacular could have, and it was backed by his stinging slide guitar. Muddy occasionally did the falsetto whoops that other Mississippi artists were known for, like Tommy Johnson, and Robert Johnson, whom Waters didn’t know, but whose records he had heard. He had a particular stylistic trait of sometimes quickly repeating a word or phrase, and bouncing off it, like “Brooks run to the ocean, the ocean, running into the sea…” In the interviews recorded there, Muddy credited Son House for teaching him the music; it was House who also greatly influenced Robert Johnson.

Growing up with the Delta blues, working on the very plantation where the Mississippi blues was nurtured, tutored by the guy who was the seminal figure in the music, and tremendously talented and naturally gifted, Muddy was as qualified as anyone to take the music out to the world at large, but that’s not what typically happened with artists who were recorded for the Library of Congress. Moreover, Muddy had a relatively good job driving a tractor on the plantation. In the South at that time, plantation owners protected productive blacks like Muddy from the worst abuses of racism. Muddy performed around the plantation and the Clarksdale area, and even wrote a “praise song” for Howard Stovall and his plantation, the “Burr Clover Farm Blues.” The field recordings also feature one of his very rare recorded performances of a religious song, “Why Don’t You Live So God Can Use You.”

It may well have been the field recordings themselves that allowed Muddy to dream of playing for the world beyond Stovall. He told interviewer Paul Oliver in later years, “I really HEARD myself for the first time… when Mr. Lomax played me the record, I thought, ‘Man, this boy can sing the blues.’” Although the “plantation recordings” are definitely rural, including some backcountry songs with the Son Simms Four with a violin and mandolin, Muddy knew other music, and arrived in Chicago expecting to play something much more urban and modern. His first commercial recordings for Columbia right after World War II were just that, but they didn’t excite their producers and weren’t issued at the time. Later, Muddy arrived at Chess (then called Aristocrat), initially backing pianist Sunnyland Slim on a session, but he also cut a single of his own that day, and joined the label’s artist roster. Muddy was encouraged to do his music his way, but with electric guitar. His early recordings were very spare, some with just him and Big Crawford on bass; his classic “Rolling Stone” in 1950 (a version of the Mississippi blues song “Catfish Blues” that would end up naming a British rock band) was a solo performance. Some of the songs from the plantation sessions, such as “Country Blues” and “I Be’s Troubled,” would be recast and retitled when Muddy recorded them for the Chess label.

Selected tracks from the field recordings of Muddy Waters in 1941 and 1942 turned up on various albums in later years. Finally in 1993, all of them, including previously unissued takes and all of the interviews, were compiled on the Muddy Waters album “The Complete Plantation Recordings.” Their historical importance is immeasurable, both for the music itself and for how these first recordings affected and motivated the artist who performed for them, who would become the blues community’s favorite blues singer.

Listen to Jonny Meister discuss Muddy Waters on The Blues File: here

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