. . . way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and then the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you. We had our own horses, mules, cows, goats, and chickens, and I watered 'em from the time I was a kid. Had to pump the water, and that pump would put blisters in my hand." (From Deep Blues by Robert Palmer, copyright © 1981.)
Muddy Waters lived here from the age of three -- when in 1918 his grandmother brought him north from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, to Coahoma County and Stovall's Plantation -- until he was 28, when in 1943 he headed out for Chicago and the annals of American music history.
McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield earned his nickname here, and in 1932, where he taught himself to play Leroy Carr's How Long Blues on a new, $2.50 Stella guitar that he'd ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. In the hot summer of 1941, Alan Lomax brought his portable studio to the cabin to record Muddy's Country Blues and I Be's Troubled -- beginning a recording career that would span four decades. In 1996, Muddy's Cabin also made the trip to Chicago, after having been leased and renovated by the House of Blues, or HOB Entertainment, Inc., and taken to what was its first stop on a five-year world tour. Muddy's Cabin was returned to Stovall's Plantation in the year 2001.
Thanks Denise Tapp of Memphis for the first photo, which was taken at Stovall's Plantation in August 1995. And thanks Niles Frantz of Chicago for the second photo -- taken at the Chicago Blues Festival in June 1996.
