Music: Down Home and Dirty

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Muddy Waters is the king of dirty blues, down-home blues, funky blues or straight blues—most properly known as Delta or country blues. Along with such other black masters of this unique American art form as B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf, Muddy is riding the crest of a surprisingly long-lived blues revival. Of them all, he remains the purest, the most loyal to where he has been and what it has cost him. Muddy's brand of Delta blues is supposed to follow the traditional twelve-bar structure, but as often as not uses eleven or 13 bars. Despite its metric uncertainty, it is a two-beat, shuffling kind of music that seems to have been drilled into the central nervous systems of Muddy and his six sidemen.

On the stand last week at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, gathered around a silver and red loudspeaker bank inscribed BLUES POWER, Muddy and his men played with a controlled exuberance that suggested disciplined violence. The band was as tight as one of the strings on his slide guitar. Muddy sang in a trombone-like baritone that was as true as his middle-aged stomach is flat:

Whisky, you ain't no good. I declare I'm through with you. You done taken all of my money, Now you done taken my woman, too.

Muddy is through with whisky these days, but not because of any woman. Five years ago, during an engagement in Detroit, he developed a nosebleed that would not quit for a week. A doctor attributed it to high blood pressure and also suggested Muddy cut down on his drinking. Now when he, his sidemen and guests get thirsty backstage, Muddy uncorks half a dozen or so bottles of champagne. He can afford it. Muddy won't say exactly how much he earns on a gig, but there are plenty of gigs these days, and his 1970 income was close to six figures.

Getting On. That is a decided improvement over the days when, at the age of 13, he was blowing harmonica and singing for the Saturday night fish fries in Clarksdale, Miss. "I was making about 50¢ a night, a fish sandwich and half a pint of moonshine, and I was getting on," he recalls. Muddy was born McKinley Morganfield, 56 years ago. His mother died young, so his father sent him to be raised by his grandmother. "She used to say I'd sneak out and play in the mud when I was little, so she started calling me 'Muddy,' " he told TIME Correspondent Joe Boyce. "The kids added 'Waters.' Tt was a 'sling' [meaning slang] name, and it just stuck."

At 17, he began to play guitar, imitating the choked "bottleneck" style of two older, semilegendary primitives, Eddie "Son" House and Robert Johnson. Around 1941, Folk Archivist Alan Lomax came to Clarksdale and recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress. That helped convince Muddy that he might be able to make it up North, where the factories had work, and a job was not called off if it rained. As Muddy once put it: "I came up to Chicago on a train. Alone. With a suitcase, one suit of clothes and a guitar."