📍Stovall Road, Clarksdale, MS 38614, USA
1918 – 1943“I was born McKinley Morganfield in Mississippi, and when my mother died when I was little, my grandmother, Della Grant, brought me to Stovall Plantation, outside Clarksdale, in the flat cotton country of the Delta. She called me Muddy because I loved to play in the mud of Deer Creek, and the name stuck. I lived most of my first thirty years in a small wooden cabin on Stovall, working in the cotton fields and later driving a tractor. I started on the harmonica as a boy, and at seventeen I sold the last horse we had and bought a guitar. I learned from records by Son House and Robert Johnson, and from watching Son House play at house parties. I played at juke joints and fish fries around Clarksdale on Saturday nights, and I ran a little juke house in my cabin, selling whiskey and playing music. In August 1941, Alan Lomax and John Work came from the Library of Congress and recorded me on the front porch of my cabin, and when I heard my own voice played back, I thought, I can do it, I can do it. Lomax came back the next summer and recorded me again. In 1943 I left Stovall for Chicago, and I plugged in an electric guitar so I could be heard over the noise of the clubs. My records for Chess, like Hoochie Coochie Man and Mannish Boy, created the Chicago blues and inspired the Rolling Stones, who named themselves after my song. My cabin from Stovall was restored and is now in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today