I finally made my first visit to the Mississippi Delta three summers ago. We stayed three days in Clarksdale and made the trip out to the old Stovall plantation. We visited the spot where Muddy Waters’ sharecropping cabin had once stood. That humble structure had been moved to the Delta Blues Museum, but it was still an experience to stand on that spot, look across the road to the huge fields in the distance, and imagine McKinley Morganfield on a summer evening after a long day in those furrows, working on his slide guitar playing and beginning his transformation into Muddy Waters, international godfather of the blues.

Like a lot of guys my age, my first blues record was a Paul Butterfield album. Soon after I bought the album “Fathers and Sons,” on which had Paul backed up Muddy. The very next day I was back in the record store to get “The Best of Muddy Waters,” and I just wore that thing out. Muddy was the gate to the blues for me. He quickly led me to Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—the whole historical blues genius lineup was rolled out for me by Muddy Waters. He changed my life before I ever saw him in person.

From 1968 on I saw Muddy onstage many times. The first time was at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle—that was the first time I saw Paul Oscher in action, too. I’ll never forget Muddy’s Academy-Award enactment of every ounce of drama in “Long Distance Call” that night. I saw him at Ungano’s in New York City two years later, just after his terrible automobile accident—he apologized for sitting down. There was an improbable week-long gig at the posh Maisonette Room at the St. Regis Hotel, where Muddy gamely asked out for requests and a blue-haired matron cradling a martini called out for “When The Saints Go Marching In.” That spurred my friends and I into action, and we began shouting out for all of Muddy’s hits, which he delivered up to us. The great Louis Myers played guitar on that show. There was the time a bunch of us drove from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie to catch a Muddy Waters show at Vassar. We stood outside afterwards and waved goodbye to Muddy and the band as they pulled out of the parking lot in a weathered station wagon and pulling a small trainer with their equipment. I caught Muddy twice at Antone’s, where Jimmie Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, and Kim Wilson sat in and delighted him. I even got to open for him once, at a show at the Showbox in Seattle.

Onstage, Muddy looked like a king, carried himself like a king, sang like a king, and played like a king. Thirty years after making the move to Chicago as an illiterate field hand and creating a new, amplified update of the Delta blues, Muddy was traveling the globe and delivering one great show after another in country after country, and no one who saw him will forget his regal nature, his total command of the stage, and the intensity and uniqueness of his music. Muddy Waters traveled a personal journey that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend, but we can spend the rest of our lives savoring the gift he left behind—some of the most beautiful and most soulful music ever recorded.

MMuddy Waters turns 104 today.

The standard story behind the blues is that it was the acoustic folk music of the black field hands in Mississippi delta—with strong African and gospel antecedents—that spread from there to Memphis and Helena and St. Louis and then to Chicago, where southern-born black musicians created an urbanized version of the blues that served as the basis for rock and roll.

That’s all accurate. It also describes Muddy Water’s life journey.

He was born on a Mississippi plantation and raised by his grandmother, who called him “Muddy” because of his childhood habit of playing in the creek. He sang in church and played the harmonica. He grew to manhood and became a field hand on the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, where he fell under the spell of local bluesmen Charley Patton and Son House. Muddy was sharp and he was ambitious, and he soon had a profitable sideline outside of his field work selling moonshine and turning his cabin into the local juke joint and gambling house on the weekends.

He was restless, too. He visited Memphis and St. Louis, but always returned. Folkorist Alan Lomax recorded Muddy at his cabin in 1941 and 1942. He paid Muddy $10 a side and sent him two copies of a 78 record. When Muddy heard his own voice and guitar on the local jukebox, he was galvanized. “I just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it, I can do it.'" [When his plantation boss refused to give Waters a raise from 22-1/2 cents an hour to 27-1/2 cents, Muddy said goodbye to his grandmother and caught the train to Chicago, where a sister lived.

Within five years he was a mainstay of the Chicago blues scene and had formed a band—with Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Baby Face Leroy on drums, and Little Walter Jacobs on harp—that was perfecting an amplified, urban update of the patterns that Muddy had mastered as a young man. In 1948 Muddy recorded a tune for Aristocrat Records that Alan Lomax had waxed on him seven years earlier, but this time Waters’ slide guitar was amplified and Big Crawford added a loping acoustic bass part. “I Can’t Be Satisfied” was a surprise, monster hit. Aristocrat changed its name to Chess Records, and the Chicago blues sound was born.

Muddy is almost everyone’s favorite bluesman. He had incredible nuance and subtlety in his singing and playing, he carried himself onstage with profound authority, he assembled stellar bands, and his music had intensity. “His stuff had pep,” is how Willie Dixon put it. Waters’ legacy is a unique, soulful music that bridged the fields and the city and set the standard that, for better and sometimes worse, inspired an entire generation of rock and roll musicians.
Muddy Waters wasn’t just a bluesman. He literally WAS the blues.

Muddy Waters performed "Rolling Stone" live at the Newport Jazz Festival.