MUD MORGANFIELD * DEEP MUD *
“I was born in the blues,” states Mud Morganfield emphatically. That claim holds infinite validity.
You see, Mud’s father was the immortal Muddy Waters. For the last couple of decades, Mud has followed in his beloved dad’s mammoth footsteps, staunchly keeping the traditional Chicago blues flame alight by faithfully singing Muddy’s songs as well as plenty of his own originals in front of an all-star band of local heavy-hitters. He sauntered onto the main stage at the 2025 Chicago Blues Festival to belt his father’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” as one of the main cogs in a gala celebration of Chess Records’ 75th anniversary, looking and sounding every bit the heir to Muddy’s gilded throne.
That deeply held commitment to Chicago blues tradition defines Deep Mud, Morganfield’s new album for Nola Blue. Except for two lovingly rendered Chess-era Muddy revivals (“Country Boy” and “Strange Woman”), Mud’s originals dominate the hard-hitting set. As usual, his studio cohorts were the cream of the crop: guitarists Rick Kreher (an integral member of Waters’ last touring band) and Mike Wheeler, keyboardists Roosevelt “Mad Hatter” Purifoy and Sumito “Ariyo” Ariyoshi, bassist E.G. McDaniel, and drummer Melvin “Pookie Styx” Carlisle lay down tough, uncompromising grooves loaded with timeless Windy City tradition. Harpist Studebaker John filled multiple roles as Mud’s producer and arranger, with trumpeter Phil Perkins arranging the horns.
“The album wouldn’t sound like it sounds without Studebaker John’s ears,” notes Mud. “The man has a fantastic ear.”
As he’s done in the past, Mud utilized his trusty electric bass to create the disc’s original content. “What I did was, I played the bass and showed E.G. the bass lines, and he picked it up. I’m not really a bass player. I write by the bass, and I’m just beginning to play it publicly sometimes,” explains Morganfield. “For me and E.G., I go by his house, I show him what I’m looking for, and he takes it and he gives it that real bottom.”
Recorded at JoyRide Studio, this set is real, unvarnished blues from front to back, the way Muddy himself proudly did it during the genre’s hallowed heyday as he laid the bedrock foundation for the electric Chicago blues ensemble approach. “Listen, man, it is Chicago blues. None of that rock-blues,” Morganfield emphasizes. “No rock-blues here for Mud. I talk and I sing about real things, real live people, real situations, things that people go through, from falling in love to beautiful women. So it’s Chicago blues at its best. They ain’t trying to do that no more, but that’s what it is.”
It’s the latest in a series of acclaimed albums from Morganfield that commenced in 2008 with the self-produced Fall Waters Fall. Mud commenced a lengthy stint on Severn Records in 2012 with his acclaimed CD Son of the Seventh Son. He was back in 2014 with For Pops—A Tribute to Muddy Waters, a collaboration with celebrated harmonica ace Kim Wilson that found the singer digging deeply into his father’s Chess-era catalog. “That’s the killer, man, that album,” notes Mud. “Listen, you won’t find nobody to get that close to my dad, other than me!” Morganfield concluded his Severn hookup with 2018’s They Call Me Mud, releasing his most recent disc, the 2022 CD Portrait, on Delmark.
There was also a 2016 album on the Big imprint, Way Down Inside: Songs of Willie Dixon, that saw Morganfield sharing a studio with Big Head Todd and the Monsters (Ronnie Baker Brooks and Erica Brown were also on board). The set spawned a cross-country tour that Mud remembers with great fondness. “This man took care of us like royalty,” remembers Mud of Todd’s largesse. “We went in brand new buses with sleepers, kitchens, two bathrooms, from state to state.”
That endorsement is even more impressive when you consider all the exotic far-off locales that Morganfield has toured during his more than two decades of performing, including repeated visits to England as well as Italy, Russia and China. No matter where he travels, Mud’s regal bloodlines inevitably factor heavily into his onstage set list.
“I can’t get away from it. That’s why it’s such a double-edged sword,” he says. “A lot of—I don’t know what you call ‘em, haters?—they’ll be like, ‘Ahhh, we heard Muddy Waters. I can go put on a Muddy Waters album.’ But if you happen to have not seen my dad because of his passing, I’m the closest thing you’re gonna see to a live performance from Muddy Waters. I don’t care where I go, I can be doing a couple of my songs, and the audience will scream out, ‘Do “Mojo!” Do “Mannish Boy”’! I can’t get away, so I give in.”
Everything in Mud’s musical life traces directly back to his father. “Dad played the most important role with my being. He shared an affair with my mother, and they had me!” he says. “I was born in the blues, man. People don’t understand that. Did you hear what I said? I used to have to tap music on the side of my head before I went to sleep, man. I’ve had music running through my being all my life, since I’ve been here.”
Despite that, Morganfield got a late start on his professional blues performing exploits, initially inspired by a recurring dream that he couldn’t shake. “It was almost spooky,” he says. “Dad was just performing. I kept talking to him. He wouldn’t say anything, just kept playing.” Watching a television special on his father, The Kennedy Center Presents: A Tribute to Muddy Waters, King of the Blues, hosted by actor Billy Dee Williams and starring Muddy’s former labelmates Johnnie Johnson, Bo Diddley, Koko Taylor, and Buddy Guy as well as Mud’s half-brother, blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield, was also integral. “That was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Mud. “Just so many great blues artists, and they didn’t even mention me,” says Mud. “Me and my mom sat there and watched that program, knowing that they were going to recognize his first-born son. They didn’t.
“After the program went off, my mom—she just passed in March—she watched that program through the credits. And I just happened to come back in the living room, and she was crying. I thought something was wrong. I said, ‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘They didn’t even mention my son.’ And I vowed from that day that the world would know about me. And I took her to every show I had in driving distance.”
Mud’s mother, Mildred McGhee, was Muddy’s girlfriend during the blues legend’s glory years at Chess Records. Early in Mud’s life, he and his mother lived on Chicago’s South Side in a building located around 46th and Greenwood owned by Joseph Chess, father of Chess bosses Leonard and Phil Chess. “We stayed in there for a while, and I used to see Bo Diddley, Wolf, and all these guys. But I was still a kid. I didn’t know who they were. We’d pass ‘em in the hallway,” he says. “Huge building, a lot of apartments. I really think it was Muddy’s rendezvous spot. I think it was Muddy’s little getaway spot. But I used to see all those guys in there, man. I didn’t know nothing about who they were.” Muddy and his wife Geneva lived nearby at 43rd Street and South Lake Park Avenue.
From there, Mud and his mom moved to Chicago’s West Side, near the famous Maxwell Street open-air market. They eventually relocated again to the West Side’s Lawndale area. “Rough place. You know, Chicago’s rough anyway, I don’t care how you cut it. But I tell folks all the time, I wouldn’t want to change that,” he says. Morganfield attended Harrison High School. “I didn’t graduate. But I went and got my GED and I went over to Malcolm X College and picked up a degree, and I went to DeVry Institute,” says Mud. “I started driving trucks for J.B. Hunt. As a matter of fact, I retired from them. I drove for J.B. about eight years, but I drove for other outfits.”
As Mud grew up, Waters was there to help his offspring in any and all of his musical endeavors (Muddy lived in a nice house in west suburban Westmont during the ‘70s, a long way from Chicago’s hardscrabble South Side). “I started out as a drummer,” says Mud. “I’d get a set of drums from Dad—first the little paper ones. I had to let this music out some way. Then I would tear them up, and then a couple of weeks later he’d get me another pair. And he finally got me a real set with some tougher skins. You know, just starting off an amateur, I would bust the snare on that. And one day, I don’t know, I was about 16 years old, I went to an Earth, Wind & Fire concert. And I saw Verdine White playing bass, and that did it. That did it, man. I put the drums down, and I’ve been playing the bass secretly at least 30-something years now.
“One thing Dad didn’t do was push us to playing guitar music. He didn’t push that. You had to want it. So he saw that I was so into music because of him and his genes ‘til when I got to the age of 15 or something and started to doing bass, he would have me come by his house and he’d have his manager Scott Cameron take me over to his house. ‘Cause Scott Cameron kept all the band’s instruments downstairs. I went down in that basement, and it was like I was at Circuit City or something. I mean, wall-to-wall amplifiers, brand-new. They were bigger than me even, man. And he told me, ‘Get what you want!’ I’m like a kid in a candy store, man! I’m like, ‘Scott, I want this one here with the piggyback!’
“So he gave it to me, and I played with a couple little bands in my neighborhood, garage bands, so to speak. No big deal. I remember as a young man—I was a little older then, about 23 years old—I used to try to sing Tyrone Davis songs, Johnnie Taylor songs. But it kept sounding like Muddy Waters. I don’t care what I sing, man, it’s gonna come out like Father’s. And I just said, ‘Hey, I can’t run.’ I couldn’t run no more. I couldn’t keep running, man. I have to get in where I fit in. I have to do what God put me here to do.”
Despite his longstanding interest in the blues, Mud was a late bloomer as a professional musician, not emerging on the local scene with his burnished pipes until the 2000s. Veteran blues chanteuse Mary Lane gave him some of his earliest showcases on the West Side. “When you didn’t see me, I was getting my blues. I didn’t want to be an artist that could just play the blues or sing the blues. I had to have some blues of my own to sing about,” he says. “That’s why when folks ask me, ‘Where you been, man? Your dad passed in ‘83.’ Well, I had to get some blues, man. Look, you don’t just get up—and Dad told them this—you don’t just get up and go outside and say, ‘Look at me—I’m a bluesman!’ You’ve got to go through something, fight for survival.
“I don’t care if you can play blues. You’ve got to have some blues, man. So that’s what I was doing—getting my blues.”
It’s safe to say that Muddy would be proud of the way Mud Morganfield is carrying on the family tradition. “That was my main goal, just to do that,” Mud says. “I didn’t get a chance to really show him because he had passed, but I hope if there’s a place we go when we leave here and he can still visualize or see us back down here, I want him to say that: ‘I’m proud of him!’” --Bill Dahl
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