Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters, seen here not even attempting to smile.

McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), better known by the derisive stage name of Muddy Waters, was a pioneering blues guitarist and infamous mopey jerk. He is widely considered to be the father of modern Deep Dish blues, the father of the modern whining sad dude,^[1] and not the father of Rashida Wilson's child.^[2] Living a life governed by the blues, he immersed himself in his music and let depressing reality take over his personality, cultivating a mythologically morose demeanor.^[3] Nevertheless, he inexplicably got a ton of pussy.^[4]

Early life

Morganfield's depression got off to a strong start when his mother died during the act of childbirth. Reportedly, the freshly-born McKinley was too exhausted to cry, being pushed and rolled around by "the woman" for the last nine months without end. Getting evicted from the comfort of the womb was the last straw. The midwife, mistakenly assuming the depressed baby to be dead, left him to rot in the gutter, which filled up with muddy water from the sheets of rain pouring down overhead.^[5]

For those without comedic tastes, the so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Muddy Waters.

Morganfield was noticed and taken in by a genial vicar who happened to wander nearby on the way to the YMCA, who raised him for the entirety of his difficult, angsty childhood in the rural badlands near Biloxi, Mississippi.^[6] Young Muddy, then just known as Young McKinley, was plagued by punishing sessions of explosive diarrhea, an unfortunately frequent occurrence that earned him the derisive nickname of "Muddy Waters" amongst his peers.^[7]

However, Muddy contested this origin of his nickname until his day of death, insisting that his legendary moniker couldn't have "come out of some stupid shit joke," in his autobiography Bridge over Muddied Waters: The Muddy Waters Story. "Everybody shits," he continued, "but tons of other stuff about mud and water happened to me in my life. Just go back a little in this book and find out for yourself. Remember the thing with the midwife? It isn't all about shit jokes."^[8] The constant explosive diarrhea became less frequent in his teens until he eventually outgrew it; in turn, he accomplished more than most present-day blues historians, who still dwell on the issue and snicker at the phrase "constant explosive diarrhea".

Those Terrible Teens

The social and family troubles of Waters's childhood sublimated into lyrical moroseness the instant he received a harmonica on his fourteenth birthday.^[9] Muddy, who had wanted the new Hess Truck, was so disappointed that he wrote two dozen songs about why he disliked his new harmonica, then performed them with his new harmonica. His disappointments compounded later that year when, instead of the crayons he had been pining for, he only got an acoustic guitar for Christmas.^[10]

The vicar discovered Muddy had a knack for writing songs about life's various letdowns and set out to purposefully ruin his life, in hopes that he'd get noticed by a highfalutin record company. Several years passed with no luck, though during this period Muddy penned some of his most notable early hits, such as "Mousetraps All Over My Room Blues" and "Grenade In My Cheerios Blues". Lightning struck when musical renegade Alan Lomax saw Waters playing "Lightning Struck Me Blues" while hogtied up the flagpole during a vicious rainstorm.^[11] Lomax dug his rough, emotional take on country blues and recorded a couple hundred of his songs—most of them about hating harmonicas—for preservation in the Library of Congress.

"Success"

Muddy Waters crying into/about his least favorite microphone.

Rather than being inspired by the recognition, Muddy believed he had "sold out to the Man" and developed a sense of self-loathing. The vicar, sensing a goldmine of malaise, convinced his neighbors to shun Muddy, tar and feather him, and run him out of town on a rail.^[12] Pockets full of horrific experience, he fled to Chicago to start his career as a professional complainer.

Muddy was taken in by his friend and fellow musician Big Bill Broonzy, who got him gigs at nightclubs by calling in various sexual favors.^[13] Waters despised these nightclubs, their rowdy atmospheres constantly drowning out the sound of his quiet acoustic blues. Despairing, he sold his harmonica—something he had been wanting to do for a long time—and bought a large, heavy object with which he could drown himself. For once, things were going according to plan, and he nearly achieved happiness when he tied the amplifier to his legs and prepared to jump into the muddy waters of the Chicago River. Regrettably, a passing deacon on his way to the local YMCA stopped him before he could jump.

Despite his suicidal complaints, the deacon dragged Waters into his warm home, force-fed him some chicken noodle soup, drugged him with warm milk, and trapped him in a comfortable bed with an extremely tight tucking-in. To add insult to injury, the deacon took notice of the deadly amplifier and donated his prized electric guitar to Muddy, an outspoken Luddite.^[14] This act of charity irritated Muddy so much that he began performing his new songs, about the electric guitar, with the electric guitar purely out of spite. Talent scouts took notice of his loud, sarcastic sound while busking at Chicago's Woodfield Mall. Chicago Tribune writer Jonathan Gonzalez reflects in his biography Muddy Waters Under the Bridge: Another Book About Muddy Waters With The Word "Bridge" In the Title:

More recent statements from Muddy himself reveal that this couldn't be farther from the truth.^[15]

Muddy's patented style of emotionally raw electric blues was dubbed "mall blues" or "emo blues", a label that most critics view as redundant. Muddy received brief personal recognition for his accidental musical breakthrough, and was almost able to cast aside his spiteful ironies and adopt the style as his own. Within a year, the malls of Chicago soon overflowed with dozens of imitators from all over the country, eventually leading to the impersonal and commercialized version of Muddy's original concentrated blues angst. A new style known as "screamo blues" was thus born.^[16] The budding genre was quickly plucked from Muddy's grasp, and he resumed depressed business as usual.^[17]

Electric Mud

Muddy Waters, seen here projecting his emptiness onto Electric Mud's cover.

There appeared to be no cure for Muddy's depression and exponentially growing rage with the world. Smashing his guitar after a concert was reported as musical heroism and rebelliousness, not justified violence against an instrument that brought him untold depths of pain and suffering. He attempted suicide four different times, and each attempt was interrupted by a pastor, shaman, Buddhist monk, and rabbi, respectively.^[18] After a point, he hadn't just given up on life, he gave up on death.^[19] As usual, he transcribed all of these woes into rollicking electric blues hits, ironically raking in more and more success.

The answer to all his troubles came knockin' on his door in 1967, when label chief Mashall Chess came knockin' on Muddy's door and presented the blues guitarist with a fistful of marijuana.^[20] Muddy rolled his eyes and monotonously mumbled "Why the hell not." They dissected the dank nugget, picked out the seeds and stems, and proceeded to get high as hell. The experience was uniquely pleasant and provided Muddy with his "Eureka!" moment; he didn't need to kill himself and risk being happened upon by a passing archbishop, all he had to do was murder his career to escape the hellhole rat race of being a musical superstar.

Muddy first attempted to destroy his career literally with little success.^[21] He then decided upon a more abstract approach, took a hit from a bong, and channeled the negative energy within him into eight tracks of psychedelic self-destruction called Electric Mud.

Initially, the album was met with ambivalent returns. It sold hundreds of thousands in the opening months but was critically reviled, providing Muddy with a healthy dose of self-verification.^[22] Rolling Stone magazine called it "A big, barely-blue travesty. A classic example of once remarkable black dudes veering into white rock just to sell records above the poverty line and lavish themselves in a sea of white rumps," though the reviewer was fired the next day for writing a terrible, racist review.^[23] The Allmusic review carried the same message, but was more veiled in its racist tones: "It's like watching Al Pacino trying to play basketball. He just can't do it."^[24] The most famous review, however, comes from the Toronto Sun, which simply published two words: "Electric shit."^[25]

Muddy briefly felt something that was perhaps akin to joy when reading these scathing reviews, but it gave way to seeping defeat when his high ran out and he realized people hated his record because they thought he was trying to sell out, not because he was just trying to make a shitty record.^[26] Still, the money he earned from it allowed him to purchase a private island to sulk on for the next thirty years. Not much was heard about Muddy, who spent most of his time brooding on sunny shores and composing tunes on ukuleles he despised, until he died in 1983 by choking himself to death with a plastic bag.^[27] Mysteriously, he burned all of the churches on the island to cinders before he went on his merry way, much to the delight of the local savages.

Sex life

Despite his constant brooding and inability to smile or interact normally with others, Waters had an extremely healthy sex life that he hated every minute of. He attracted women of every color and creed and, being too apathetic to turn them away, reluctantly bedded them. Between the years of 1951 and 1968, Muddy was the hootchie-cootchie man to over seven hundred and fifty hootchie-cootchie mamas. Muddy described his battles with hot indiscriminate sex best in an interview with the New York Times:

According to Tina Turner, who Waters allegedly fisted backstage on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, such an occasion was nearly a daily event, and he used his experience to great effect. More often than not, both he and his partner would collapse into tears after the act of intercourse for completely different reasons. Some women slept with Muddy for the fame and some for the dashing good looks, but most were attracted to him because of his boundless depressive personality that lent him the aura of a "troubled bad boy," as former lover Janis Joplin put it.^[28] He was shanghaied into marriage four times by infatuated fans, the last of which grew so obsessed with his sullen nature that he was forced to summon up the energy to file a restraining order.^[29]

Muddy fathered fourteen known illegitimate children, all of which he left rotting in gutters immediately after their births. He attempted to avoid the fateful stress of being a bastard father by getting a vasectomy as soon as he hit puberty, but he accidentally wound up sleeping with three of the nurses, impregnating one.^[30] Muddy then attempted condoms but thought they were too distracting, eventually giving up on contraception entirely.^[31]

Legacy

Waters left behind an unprecedented collection of 50,000 unpublished recordings following his untimely suicide, leading most music historians to believe that he was, in fact, more depressed than was initially thought. Each song is between two or three minutes long and was estimated to be recorded during the summer of 1977, a time most Muddy Waters biographers and bridge pun-makers now know was "The Shitty Summer of Seventy-Seven", so-named after Muddy's own "The Shitty Summer of Seventy-Seven Blues". Topics range from obscenely massive mood-killers ("Trapped Under a Tsunami Blues") to comically unimportant nuisances ("My Shoulder Feels Sort of Weird Blues"). This period of ludicrous blues songwriting efficiency has met no equal to this date, though it was nearly rivaled by Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1996 during his infamous Month of 1000 Toe-Stubbings.

Footnotes

The color blue.

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