The fascinating details surrounding Muddy Waters’ childhood
While few blues artists are as iconic, influential and dominating as Muddy Waters, the fact remains that he is just as mysterious as he is renowned. IT goes without saying, Muddy Waters brought the music of the Mississippi Delta with him when he left in the 1940s in search of a better life.
Waters had been a touch elusive during interviews when it came to detailing his life. He once claimed that he was born in Rolling Fork, Sharkey County, Mississippi, in 1915. However, records show that he was, in fact, born in Jug’s Corner, Issaquena County, in 1913, by the name of McKinley Morganfield.
Waters’ father was a muleskinner known to have musical talent, and he would frequently sing and play the guitar at weekend barbeques. As for his mother, she sadly died just after giving birth to Waters, so he was entrusted to the care of his grandmother, Della Grant. His grandmother lived on a cotton plantation and worked as a sharecropper, just about a step above slavery at the time, in return for a small plot of land.
It’s also said that Waters’ penchant for splashing around in the puddles near his grandmother’s house earned him the nickname ‘Muddy’. However, his childhood was difficult, and after three years of school, he was also expected to pick up a cotton sack and fill it up daily. Fortunately, both gospel music and the blues would soon be discovered by the young Waters and brought him some solace.
By the time he had moved with his grandmother to a different plantation, Waters was crazy about the blues. He would play music in any way he could, including singing and playing the accordion and harmonica and fashioning several homemade instruments. However, his grandmother did not necessarily approve of his newfound love for the blues.
Given her devout beliefs, she found her grandson’s playing to be sinful. She would banish him from the house when his early playing got to be too much. Blues did not praise the Lord in the same way that the gospel did. Waters once noted, “My grandmother told me when I first picked that harmonica up. She said, ‘Son, you’re sinning. You’re playing for the devil. Devil’s gonna get you.'”
However, Waters’ passion for the music of the south was even more resolute. His love for the Blues was even more enlightened at 14 when he saw Son House play the guitar with a bottleneck one night in Clarksdale. Waters knew his future lay within that six-string instrument, so he traded his harmonica for a guitar and eventually bought his own at the age of 17.
Waters noted: “I got stone crazy when I seen somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree, and I said that I had to learn. I sold the last horse we had. Made about fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother seven dollars and fifty cents, I kept seven-fifty and paid about two-fifty for that guitar.” And the rest is Blues history.
