“Them the kind of sons I like!”: The classic rock artists Muddy Waters admired more than any other
If it wasn’t for the blues, the whole landscape of western popular music would look a lot different than it does today, and if it wasn’t for Muddy Waters, then the electric blues would have been unrecognisable, as well. He wasn’t known as the ‘Father of Modern Chicago Blues’ for nothing.
Without Muddy Waters, we might not know about other blues greats, who he either brought into his bands over the years or inspired with his singing and playing, like Little Walter, Otis Spann, James Cotton, Pinetop Perkins, Buddy Guy, BB King, Otis Rush and countless others, but we also wouldn’t have so much of the classic rock that is so formative to our music history and culture.
Led Zeppelin famously mined the blues for things they liked the sound of and freely borrowed whatever they wanted along the way, including from Muddy Waters, and Eric Clapton (another culture vulture), who has cited Waters as a formative influence. Even Angus Young of AC/DC has cited Waters as a major influence, and has said that the Back in Black track ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ borrows its title from a 1962 Muddy Waters song.
And they weren’t the only ones. Unlike Led Zeppelin, most of the groups who formulated in the ripples of Muddy Waters’ impact had more reverence to show for him, and a little appreciation went a long way with the great man himself.
“Johnny Winter, The Rolling Stones, Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, Mike Bloomfield. All of them, my boys,” Waters said once in an interview.
“The Stones, they the ones who put a nice shine in my armour, you know,” he added. “They did me a big favor for recording my records. And they made the point, ‘This is from Muddy Waters. That’s where we got it from’. Them the kind of sons I like!”
And in talking about things that we wouldn’t have if not for Muddy Waters, well then, you have to talk about The Rolling Stones.
In a foreword to Robert Gordon’s excellent, must-read biography Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, one of the greatest music books you could ever hope to read, Keith Richards writes of Mick Jagger that “I met him on a train in 1961″.
He added, “He had a Chuck Berry record and The Best of Muddy Waters. I was going to mug the guy for the Chuck Berry because I wasn’t familiar with Muddy. We started talking, went round to his house, and he played me Muddy, and I said ‘Wow, again’. And about ten hours later, I was still going ‘OK, again!’ When I got to Muddy and heard ‘Still a Fool’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, that is the most powerful music that I’ve ever heard. The most expressive.”
Richards then explains that not only did Waters bring the band together, but also gave them their name. When they were asked what they were called ahead of an early gig booking, the band looked around quickly for inspiration, and their eyes landed on the back cover of that Muddy Waters album again, and specifically his track ‘Rollin’ Stone’.
In 1981, during a show at The Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, Waters spotted the Stones in the crowd and called them up to the stage to join him for a run through some of his greatest hits that had so inspired them twenty years before. In his personal life, Waters had an extraordinary number of children, and so it only made sense that he had something similar in his musical life, as well.
The Stones weren’t the only disciples that Waters felt like a father figure to, and he recorded perhaps his greatest ever album, Fathers and Sons, with Paul Butterfield and Michael Bloomfield in 1969 and made multiple albums with Johnny Winter and performed plenty of times over the years with The Stones, with Dylan, The Band, Butterfield, Winter and the rest of his extended musical family.
But in 1971, Waters went so far as to say that his musical children had musically surpassed him and his generation, suggesting that they could play “more blues than I could ever dream of playing”, but he admitted that, despite their prodigious talents, there was still something he had over them. “But you know, they’ll never be able to vocal like me”.
At that point, the reporter asked if he was saying that the new kids could learn to play the guitar in his style, but couldn’t hope to sing like him, Waters responded, laughing, “Like me? You mean white kids? Oh, naw! You know better than that! They ain’t got enough soul. They ain’t had enough hard times!”
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