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Gina Mac

California State University-Sacramento


1/15/18

Please write a two page paper on blues musician, Muddy Waters.

2. Please write a two page paper on the impact that The Pete Seeger had on folk music..

3. Please write a two page biographical paper on blues musician, Bessie Smith.

4. Write 2 pages on the career of the Kingston Trio.

5. A Work Cited Page is required according to MLA standards.

6. Remember MLA first page format is required.


Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915 but grew up in
Clarksdale, where his grandmother raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for
playing in mud earned him his nickname at an early age. Waters started out on harmonica but
by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties and fish fries, emulating two blues artists
who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. “His thick heavy
tone, the dark coloration of his voice and his firm almost stolid manner were all clearly derived
from House,” wrote Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, “but the embellishments which he
added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson.”

His grandmother began calling him "Muddy" when he was a baby because he liked playing in
the mud, and when he was a child on the plantation playmates added the surname "Waters."
Muddy Waters began making music when he was 3 or 4 years old. He began performing on
harmonica at country picnics and fish fries when he was 12 or 13, and had plenty of opportunity
to watch older blues singers and guitarists. Robert Johnson influenced him, and so did the
impassioned singer-guitarist Son House. But he also listened to commercial blues recordings by
Memphis Minnie, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, and Blind Lemon Jefferson on a neighbor's
phonograph.
1958, he became the first artist to play electric blues in England, and while many British folk-
blues fans recoiled in horror, his visit inspired young musicians like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards
and Brian Jones, who later named their band the Rolling Stones after Mr. Waters's early hit
"Rollin' Stone." Bob Dylan's mid-1960's rock hit "Like a Rolling Stone" and the leading rock
newspaper Rolling Stone were also named after Mr. Waters's original song.
Mr. Waters played his blues at Carnegie Hall in 1959, and in 1960 he made a triumphant
appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he introduced his blues hit "Got My Mojo
Working" to white music fans. His music was widely imitated by a generation of young white
musicians, and virtually all the leading rock guitarists who emerged in the 1960's, including Eric
Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Johnny Winter, named Muddy Waters as one of their
earliest and most important influences
Muddy Waters was more than a major influence in the pop music world. He was a great singer
of American vernacular music, a vocal artist of astonishing power, range, depth, and subtlety.
Among musicians and singers, his remarkable sense of timing, his command of inflection and
pitch shading, and his vocabulary of vocal sounds and effects, from the purest falsetto to grainy
moaning rasps, were all frequent topics of conversation. And he was able to duplicate many of
his singing techniques on electric guitar, using a metal slider to make the instrument "speak" in
a quivering, voice-like manner.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/muddy-waters-cant-be-satisfied/730/
In 1976, Muddy made an album for the Blue Sky label, in association with CBS Records. The
larger company gave him a boost, as did working with blues/rock star Johnny Winter as
producer. The resulting album, Hard Again, won a Grammy and initiated a comeback for Muddy
that lasted 6 more years, and had him opening arenas for Eric Clapton and jamming with the
Rolling Stones. Muddy lived to record three more albums, the next two also winning Grammy
awards. In addition to strong album sales, he settled a lawsuit with Arc Music, his publishing
company, allowing him to live his final years in financial comfort.
In Chicago, a stretch of 43rd Street has been renamed Muddy Waters Drive. He was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and given the Record Academy’s Lifetime
Achievement Award in 1992. A guitar has been made from a plank off his Stovall cabin, and the
cabin itself has been dismantled, sent on a tour, and then placed in the Clarksdale Blues
Museum.

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