McKinley Morganfield, born in 1915 in a little hamlet in Mississippi, was known from childhood as Muddy Waters.
He sang the blues, and was discovered and recorded in 1941 by travelling musicologist Alan Lomax, on one of his field-trips for the American Library of Congress. Muddy listened to the playback, heard for the first time that he really could sing, and realised that this could be a path out of the Delta swamps. A couple of years later he was in Chicago, playing taverns and house parties.
And the rest is history. We know now that while White Americans largely ignored Muddy and other blues singers of the time, his early recordings (and his tour to England in 1958) influenced an entire generation of English musicians. One of his songs gave The Rolling Stones their name.
The English rock explosion of the 1960s owed an immense debt to the Black electric-blues musicians. And it was the English invasion of America which finally opened American ears to their own blues musicians.
This 54-minute documentary traces Muddy's life from Delta days through to his pioneering recordings with Leonard Marshall's Chess label, through to his increasing experimentation with electric rock in the 1960s and 1970s, and to his eventual death in 1983.
Along the way we hear from his contemporaries, notably his brother Robert Morganfield, fellow Black guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and, from The Rolling Stones, Bill Wyman and a totally bizarre Keith Richards.
Keith, who cites Muddy as his key inspiration, tells how he and the rest of the Stones went to Chess Studios in Chicago to record in 1964. On the day they arrived for the first studio session, Keith saw a figure on a ladder, dressed in overalls, painting whitewash on the ceiling. The painter looked down. There, his black face spotted with white-wash, was Muddy, hard at work.
Unbelievable. So unbelievable that the only question is what drugs was Keef taking that day. Back in the real world, the Stones in fact met Muddy for the first time the day after Keith's fantastic vision. He helped move their equipment into the studio, and hung around to listen. But it's good to have Keith's fabled vision documented so clearly here - it's like a religious fanatic's sighting of the Madonna.
This doco travels pretty quickly down its road, but gives, by its end, a well-focussed portrait of Muddy, with a good sense of progression in his music and life. Muddy, in his music and in his life, took huge inspiration from sex and sensuality, and his private life, with his ongoing quest for young girls, is explored as well. It shows clearly that, right to the end, this earthy blues singer and pioneer of rock 'n roll had his Mojo well and truly working.
The full-screen image is as sharp as the historical material allows. Both the stereo and the 5.1 Dolby tracks give great sound, even for the earliest historical mono material. The stereo track is the strongest in its focus, with the 5.1 adding some overall warmth. It is as good a treatment of this material, in both visual and audio terms, as you could expect.
There are five short outtakes, which each add some extra dimension to the story, especially the final one, Got My Mojo Working, which has a fragment of a very late (1980) performance and a bizarre farewell appearance from Keith Richards. Total footage from these very brief outtakes comes to less than 11 minutes.
As a supplement to this disc, sample Muddy's fantastic performance as a key guest in The Band's farewell gig, chronicled on DVD as The Last Waltz.