Arts
Destined to sing the blues
Mud Morganfield performing in Colombo last weekend. Pic by Sandun de Silva
Mud Morganfield was 37-years-old before he stopped running from the blues. Though he was making a living driving trucks at the time, Mud wasn’t Muddy Waters’ eldest son for nothing. In Mud, who was baptized Larry Williams, the world saw the genes of the legendary Mississippi-born musician, who inspired the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Father and son looked alike, and when Mud began to sing, it could sound like Muddy had never really left the room.
But though people may have expected him to follow in his dad’s footsteps, Mud felt differently.
“I thought my dad was the bluesman and I didn’t need to do the same thing,” Mud tells the Sunday Times. “I ran so long, but the blues, they kept calling me.” Mud would release his first album over two decades after his father had passed, dead of a heart attack in 1983. ‘Fall Waters Fall,’ was self-released in 2008, followed by a “proper” first album, ‘Son of a Seventh Son,’ in 2012. But it was his latest, widely acclaimed album that brought him full circle. ‘For Pops’, a tribute to his father, won a 2015 Blues Music Award.
In town to play at the Colombo Jazz Festival last weekend, the musician says he was always waiting for the right time. The blues weren’t like other genres of music – to play them, you had to get them. To get them, you had to really see life – “You have to go through stuff; otherwise the music is not true, it’s not real.”Growing up in Chicago, Mud’s childhood felt constricted. “I saw many things; some good, some bad. When I came out of my house, there were gunshots. I remember hearing ammo and police cars and sirens. Things got worse after they shot Martin Luther King. There were riots, people burned buildings down.”
The boy was growing up away from his father – Muddy was often on the road, and he and Mud’s mother, Mildred Williams were divorced when he was only eight years old. Raised mostly by his mother, Mud says he always loved music. “I was probably tapping on my mother’s stomach when I was still inside her. Growing up, I got scolded so many times for beating on stuff with tree branches, with any stick I had in my hand.”
As a child, Mud was listening to what every other kid around him had on the radio, and it wasn’t Muddy Waters, it was Michael Jackson and The Temptations. When asked what he learned from his father, his unsentimental response is “absolutely nothing.” He explains: “My dad, he came off the plantation and was a sharecropper making just 50 cents a day. I didn’t come from that era.”
As an adult he remembers going to the Delta Museum to see the shack in which Muddy had lived on the Stovall Farms – it had been preserved for posterity. In the museum, Mud also saw the wax figure made in his father’s image. While he was aware of the honour being done to his family, there was still a disconnect.
“That’s not my dad. You know you can need someone to sit beside you. You need a man to raise a man. When I needed him…well, we didn’t get to see a lot of pops.” But who Muddy was determined the kind of musician Mud became. “I had to really come to grips with that. I was his son, who was I supposed to sound like? Elvis? No, I’m Muddy Waters’ son, so that’s what I sound like.”
As he’s grown older, Mud says he’s discovered a deep appreciation for everything they grew up with. “You know, I wouldn’t trade one day in. I saw a lot, l learned a lot about how to appreciate this life, it’s the only one you are going to get.”
Today, Mud says he loves playing his father’s music – not just because it keeps it alive for the fans, but because it does the same for him. He’s also just coming off a brand new album, which he says represents some of his best work. There’s something in it to appeal to everyone – helpings of jazz, R&B, funk, and a “whole lotta soul.” He can’t wait to play it live – he says his validation comes from the way people respond to his music. “Everytime I hit the stage, I see people clapping and laughing and having a great time,” he says.
Muddy Waters boasted a kind of rare greatness, his talent inspired generations. In his boy, this was transmitted as a kind of confidence. “I am his son, I never get butterflies, I never get stage fright. It all stems from dad’s kingship,” says Mud. “God sheds his light on many people, and I am just grateful that I get to stand in the shadow of a king.”