Muddy Waters 1915-1983
Muddy Waters is, in many ways, the archetypal bluesman. He was raised as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta, where he learned to play an acoustic guitar. He went to Chicago in 1943, and the band he assembled established the electric blues sound. Over the next three and a half-decades, his band became a springboard for many of his sidemen, launching a prominent school of blues performers.
Muddy Waters reworked Mississippi bluesman Robert Petway's "Catfish Blues" into a spare, spooky track he named "Rollin' Stone". "We wouldn't do it exactly like those older fellows," Waters said. "We put the beat with it, put a little drive to it." The Rolling Stones took their name from the title, as did, in part, Rolling Stone magazine; Bob Dylan tipped his hat with "Like a Rolling Stone."
Muddy Waters Biography (PDF) and Muddy Waters Telecaster.