The Day Muddy Waters Died

When Muddy Waters moved to Chicago in 1943, it didn’t take him terribly long to find his footing in the local music community.

“There was quite a few people around singing the blues, but most of them was singing all sad blues,” fellow bluesman Willie Dixon later said of the scene (via the 1987 book Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll). “Muddy was giving his blues a little pep.”

Though Waters worked hard, recording with multiple labels and playing with a variety of different people, his success came gradually. It wasn’t until 1950 that he finally landed a relatively popular hit, “Rollin’ Stone,” that afforded Waters some relief from the pressures of being a full-time working musician.

Of course, Waters’ career would only grow from there and his ultimate influence stretched far beyond the city of Chicago — the Rolling Stones named themselves after the aforementioned song – but even through the ’60s and ’70s, Waters’ recognition as a blues artist came more as a slow drip than a flash flood. The highest placement any of his albums ever reached on the Billboard 200 was No. 70, with 1969’s Fathers and Sons.

“I’m sorry that the world didn’t know me for 40 years,” Waters said in 1970 (via Rolling Stone). “When I was younger, I could have put out more.”

Muddy Waters’ Passing

In total, Waters released 14 studio albums, plus many more live ones. His final studio release, King Bee, arrived in 1981, produced by Johnny Winter.

Also in 1981, Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, plus pianist Ian Stewart, used their night off from tour to slip into the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago and jam a little with Waters.

Watch Members of the Rolling Stones Play With Muddy Waters in 1981

Two years later, 70-year-old Waters went to sleep on the evening of April 30, 1983 in his home and did not wake up. According to reporting by The New York Times then, he’d had a heart attack and was pronounced dead at Chicago’s Good Samaritan Hospital. His funeral was held a few days later on May 4, attended by a number of famous musicians.

“The world is richer that we had him,” Waters’ manager, Scott Cameron, said at the time..

Waters’ headstone, engraved with his given name McKinley Morganfield, has a curious discrepancy on it. In numerous interviews and other related conversations, Waters claimed he was born in 1915 and it was that year that was written on the stone, but other government-issued documents list his birth year as 1913. Regardless, etched below the dates on either side of a guitar, are the words: “The mojo is gone, The master has won…”

READ MORE: Top 10 Rolling Stones Blues Songs

Waters’ legacy lived on in the music of countless blues and rock ‘n’ roll artists. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, four years after his death.

Paul Butterfield provided the induction speech: “He really made me feel that it was all worth it to go ahead and really learn how to play my instrument.”

And Waters seemed to feel good about where his career had taken him.

“This is the best point of my life that I’m living right now,” he said in 1978, the year Waters won his eighth Grammy (via The New York Times). “I’m glad it came before I died, I can tell you.”