As part of Black History Month, NewsNation is celebrating artful and creative pioneers within the Black community who have left an indelible mark on the arts and shattered barriers for other minority artists in the U.S. and in the world. Read about more impactful artists here.
(NewsNation) — He’s been called “The Father of Chicago Blues.” His real name is McKinley Morganfield.
But to his many fans, he’s known as Muddy Waters — or as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls him, the man with “the guitar that launched a thousand bands. “
Waters was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1987 after a storied career that inspired rockers such as the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.
A self-taught musician, Encylopedia Britannica wrote, Waters taught himself the harmonica in his childhood and when he was 17, started playing the guitar.
His exact birth date is not conclusively known, although the year on his tombstone says 1915. According to The Ledger, Waters was born near Rolling Fork, Mississippi and learned to play the blues as a boy growing up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale.
It was on that sharecropped plantation that Waters drove a tractor and operated the cabin, which he turned into a “juke house” where visitors could party. At house parties, he would earn a little money playing at house parties, performing both on his own and in a band.
In 1943 Waters headed to Chicago, along with many other African Americans in the South during the Great Migration, and started making containers at a paper factory.
At the time, “Chicago was still in the full swing of jazz,” The Ledger wrote, so Waters had many of his first gigs at house parties and clubs in the city. The crowded, noisy atmosphere of these places posed a challenge, so in 1944, Waters bought an electric guitar — giving his sound new energy.
“That’s really how the Chicago blues came about,” said Jerry Portnoy, a harmonica player who performed and recorded with Muddy in the 1970s, per the Ledger. “It’s the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Eventually, Waters would sign a contract with Chess Records in 1947 — the first major deal for them both, the Ledger wrote. Only a year later, a song of Waters’ called “I Feel Like Going Home” became a Top 20 hit on Billboard’s R&B chart. Other songs like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Just Make Love to Me” and “I’m Ready” would get in the Top 5 of the charts in 1954.
With all this success, Waters was able to buy his first house, which is now a city landmark at 4339 South Lake Park Avenue. Once a gathering place for musicians and entertainers to host “jam sessions,” this house is now the home of the Muddy Waters MOJO Museum.
Chicago’s city council recently approved the sale of an adjacent lot to the museum’s founder and executive director, and Waters’ great-granddaughter, Chandra Cooper, The Hyde Park Herald reported. Now, she plans to make the lot a landscaped yard and outdoor performance space for the MOJO Museum.
Cooper told the newspaper she’s excited about furthering her great-grandfather’s legacy, including the work he did for social justice.
For instance, Cooper said, Waters attended the 1963 March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We want to be able to tell the whole story about the blues,” she said. “We want to tell his story about being a sharecropper; his story about being in the social justice area.”