Muddy Waters's Birthplace

McKinley Morganfield was born in the Jug's Corner community of rural Issaquena County, in 1913 or 1914 or 1915 depending on which record is believed, and he claimed Rolling Fork as his birthplace for the rest of his life, which is why the marker stands on a courthouse lawn in Sharkey County rather than where he was born. His mother died soon afterwards and his grandmother Della Grant raised him, giving him the name that stuck and moving him while he was still a young child to Stovall Farms outside Clarksdale, a hundred miles north. So the Delta claims him at both ends and almost nothing of him survives at either. What he carried to Chicago in 1943 was the acoustic bottleneck style he had learned around Stovall; the electric band sound came afterwards, built on a guitar he came by in the mid 1940s, bought or given by an uncle depending on the telling. Alan Lomax and Fisk University's John Work III had recorded him at Stovall in 1941 and Lomax returned in 1942, so the player he was before Chicago is preserved on disc, which very few who made that journey can claim. Rolling Fork itself was torn open on the evening of 24 March 2023 by a tornado that touched down in Issaquena County, the county he was actually born in, reached EF4 as it crossed into Sharkey and killed thirteen people in the town. Satellite analysis three years on found about half the town's structures had been damaged or destroyed, with recovery running fastest on the larger houses and slowest on the mobile homes where most of the dead had been. Any description of the town written before that night describes a place that no longer exists in the same form.