McKinley Morganfield ( April 4, 1915 or 1913– April 30, 1983), better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician and is generally considered " the father of Chicago blues."
Morganfield was born in an area of Issaquena County, Mississippi near the Mississippi River known as Jug's Corner. The nearest town, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, is incorrectly believed to be his birthplace. He got his nickname Muddy Waters from his grandmother growing up in the area because of his fondness for playing in mud puddles.
Waters' mother died when he very young, and he was subsequently raised by his grandmother. They moved to the Stovall Plantation outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi when he was three. He was very eager to play music as a child, and bought his first guitar in 1930. He was soon in a regional outfit, the Son Sims Four, as a vocalist. Waters worked on his guitar style with the group.
Waters was first recorded on a Mississippi Delta plantation by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941. Lomax had returned to Mississippi to make additional recordings of the late, great, legendary Robert Johnson, unaware that Johnson had been dead for three years. Upon learning of Johnson's demise, Lomax was pointed in the direction of Muddy Waters.
Waters played music anywhere from church picnics to disreputable juke joints, but he longed for a break from the hardscrabble life of rural Mississippi, so after a fight with a plantation overseer in 1943, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, and took a factory job. In Chicago he switched from acoustic to electric guitar which was becoming increasingly popular among black musicians, as it allowed them to be heard in heavily crowded city bars. Waters' own guitar playing was gaining notoriety due to his use of the bottleneck on electric guitar (heavily influenced by Robert Johnson's acoustic style).