Ain't fixin' to think 'bout Iran no more today blues

Actually, Long Distance Call with McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters), Junior Wells, and Mike Bloomfield.



On Muddy Waters and the blues tradition.

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October '38,” Waters said. “I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin' Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There's been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

It must have been amazing to see him play in the sixties and seventies during the "blues revival," knowing his personal history stretched back directly to Son House and, through him, to Robert Johnson.

In fact, one of the treasures of the Internets is a site called Wolfgang's Concert Vault. There you can find hundreds of concert recordings from the personal stash of the late, lamented (by some, including me) Bill Graham. Amongst the jewels is a full November 6, 1966 performance of "The Muddy Waters Blues Band," recorded at the "Fillmore Auditorium." The play is loose, informal -- nothing like the tighter, more rhythmically charged versions of his songs that the Allman Bros. would perform and record just a few years later -- but entirely powerful.