17/06/2026
Johnny Winter loved Waters’s early Chess Records and wanted to produce records in the same vein. He felt the attempts by Chess to repackage Muddy to suit the latest musical trends didn’t do justice to the blues legend.
“I thought Chess had messed him up pretty good,” says Johnny. “They had a Muddy Waters Folk Singer album. The Brass and the Blues record wasn’t bad but it wasn’t really Muddy. I hated Electric Mud. It just wasn’t Muddy Waters at all. It wasn’t Muddy’s band; it was a psychedelic band playing the blues. The publicity shot-Muddy in a robe with his hair up—was pretty terrible. I don’t think he had that good a relationship with Leonard and Marshall Chess. He said Chess wasn’t doin’ a lot to promote his albums, and he didn’t make much money from his old records. He wasn’t getting the proper control and respect.”
Johnny respected the stylistic difference between his music and Waters’s blues, which like the music of John Lee Ho**er, didn’t always stick to time signatures. Waters would throw in odd measures and make changes at unexpected times, which affected the meter. “Some of the old blues songs that Muddy played didn’t change at the right times,” says Johnny. “‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” and ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ are hard songs to follow because they don’t change when you think they’re going to—they change at a different point.”
Guitarist Bob Margolin, who joined Waters’s band in 1973, agreed that his style could be challenging to follow. “Muddy’s blues in general had a behind-the-beat feel called delay time,” said Margolin. “The note would come a little later than you would expect it to. A lot of bluesmen had it. I certainly didn’t have it naturally when I got in the band—I really had to work on playing that way. Johnny was able to get with that too.”
Source: Sullivan, Mary Lou. Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter
Photo: Jon Stevert
