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Quotes by Muddy Waters

All the kids made their own git-tars. Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn't do much with it, but that's how you learn.
– Muddy Waters
At night in the country, you'd be surprised how that music carries. You could hear my guitar way before you get to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollerin' and screamin'.
– Muddy Waters
Every girl I met mistreated me. I'm tellin' you-every girl.
– Muddy Waters
Going to Chicago was like going out of the world... I went up to St. Louis for a litle while, and I didn't like it.
– Muddy Waters
I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.
– Muddy Waters
I got that first record out, it came out in '47... Then my name began to ring around. I began to take over. From that point, I tell you, Chicago was in my hand, all the more time that those guys had to listen to me.
– Muddy Waters
I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.
– Muddy Waters
I met Little Walter before I started recording. He was around Chicago. He used to play Chicago in a place called Jew Town. That's on the streets. He was a great harp player but he didn't have the Walter style then, he had John Lee Williams, Sonny Boy, not Rice Miller, he was playin' on that style. He changed everything when he got with me.
– Muddy Waters
I play just straight E when I use my bar. But see if I play in A tuning, I gotta tune all over. When you're doin' a show, I ain't got time just to set there and keep on tunin' over and over. So I learned to use that bar and go in any key I wanna go in and do the slide.
– Muddy Waters
I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.
– Muddy Waters
I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.
– Muddy Waters
I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good-I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.
– Muddy Waters
I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?
– Muddy Waters
I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.
– Muddy Waters
I was born in Rolling Fork and raised up in a little town called Clarksdale. When I went back to play some music in Rolling Fork, I had records out then. I wasn't raised in Rolling Fork. I was born there, and came away from there when I was 2 years old. I was raised on Stovall Plantation.
– Muddy Waters
I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.
– Muddy Waters
I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.
– Muddy Waters
I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.
– Muddy Waters
If I had a million dollars, I just wouldn't just completely set back. I'd have to get out there and show my face to all these good people who like me, I have to get out there and show my face. The only thing that would set me back if I get sick or something or pass away, that's all you can do about that you know. But as long as I got my health goin' pretty good, I'll show up around here.
– Muddy Waters
If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.
– Muddy Waters
Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.
– Muddy Waters
Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.
– Muddy Waters
My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.
– Muddy Waters
Now that I'm gettin' old enough to get some money, I'd like to have some money. I don't get much made, I need to conquer a big chunk of money. Not quit playin' but quit playin' so hard.
– Muddy Waters
Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.
– Muddy Waters
Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
– Muddy Waters
Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.
– Muddy Waters
Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.
– Muddy Waters
Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.
– Muddy Waters
Seem like everybody could play some kid of instrument, and there were so many fellers playing in the jukes 'round Clarksdale I can't remember them all. But the best we had to my ideas was Sonny House. He used to have a neck of a bottle over his little finger, touch the strings with that and make them sing. That's where I got the idea from.
– Muddy Waters
That great big police come down Sunflower with that big cap on, man, just waving that stick. You had to go in the country.
– Muddy Waters
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
– Muddy Waters
The blacks have their parties, hustle a little liquor, get some things together, and I used to play for those peoples. They'd come get me on time, but they wouldn't bring me back on time... Done picked cotton all day, play all night long, then pick cotton all day the next day before I could get a chance to sleep.
– Muddy Waters
Them older people... they didn't think you could make it in no kind of city. They think if you get in the city-starvation.
– Muddy Waters
There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues-the blues we used to have when we had no money.
– Muddy Waters
We made the whiskey in canal ditches in the woods, hid off the highways. We'd get some of them 50-gallon oil drums, that's what you cook it in. All the South was dry then, the people so thirsty for it... you make it, you sell it. No agin, no nothing. Sell.
– Muddy Waters
You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?
– Muddy Waters