Muddy Waters's Cabin

McKinley Morganfield, known as Muddy Waters, spent most of his first thirty years in a cabin on this part of Stovall Farms, sharecropping and driving a tractor, and by the early 1940s running a juke house on the side with a gambling wheel, a jukebox and whiskey he made himself. In August 1941 Alan Lomax and John Work arrived on a field recording expedition funded by the Library of Congress and Fisk University, set portable disc cutting gear up in the house, and recorded him along with the fiddler Henry Son Simms. Lomax returned with Lewis Jones in 1942. Waters had never recorded before, and what he remembered was the playback: he sounded, he said, just like anybody's records, and he took the pressing Lomax sent him up to the corner, put it on the jukebox, played it and played it and told himself he could do it. He left for Chicago in May 1943, after an overseer refused him twenty five cents an hour for driving the tractor. An uncle gave him his first electric guitar the following year, and the amplified band sound he built on it ran directly into rock and roll. Thirteen of the Lomax sides came out in 1966 as Down on Stovall's Plantation and the full set in 1993, preserving the acoustic Delta player he was beforehand. The cabin is no longer on the site: what survived of it was dismantled, toured by the House of Blues from 1996, including the Atlanta Olympics, sat in a warehouse, and was finally rebuilt from its original cypress boards inside the Delta Blues Museum. Stovall Farms remains in the family that gave it its name.