Rollin' Stone / Walking Blues - Muddy Waters
Why included: 4th in RYM's Top 10 singles of 1950
A-side: Rollin' Stone
Apple Music link: https://music.apple.com/us/album/rollin-stone/1425237096?i=1425238011
Often in the blues genre, there are these brief moments where a certain tone, a certain sharp vocal crack, or a certain musical phrase penetrates deeply into the depths of your soul and stays with you forever. They feel like a hidden treasure, something no one else has noticed, and thus are so deeply personal to you and your connection with that artist. Describing such moments to regular people who do not understand the blues is nearly impossible because they are such subtle details that can be easily missed by those not sensitive enough to detect them. But once you have heard them, they are never forgotten.
I cannot even begin to count how many of those small moments I can find within Muddy's vast collection of classics. Almost everybody is going to have a favorite part of each song of his, but in the case of "Rollin' Stone," I feel there can only be one valid answer: the first two seconds. Those two seconds are all that are required for that unbelievably brutal riff to pulverize your mind into a million pieces. Muddy had learned well from the merciless intensity of pickers like Son House, but on this song, he took it to a whole new level. This riff feels alive, the snarl of a lurking animal that will strike if provoked. The fact that the song is instrumentally only carried by that riff makes it feel almost frozen in time, moving frame by frame with each repetition of the phrase.
It is this musical backbone that heightens the violent effect of hearing him belt out those lyrics. Few things are as powerful as Muddy screaming out "SWIMMIN' IN A HOOOOOO deep blue sea," even if it is not totally clear at first why the lyric demands such treatment. It is when you grab deeper at the subtle overtones of his vocals that you hear the pain and suffering he endured in his life being generated into a dark, menacing spirit, one that permeates practically everything he ever recorded. In this case, it only serves to make the imagery of females fishing after a catfish feel so much more deadly and skin-crawling than it already was. The song at its core is so simple, but brought to life with Muddy's genius, it becomes an unbelievably terrifying sonic universe that hardly anything before or after could compete with. The most smashing musical statement of its year, which is already saying a lot.
B-side: Walkin' Blues
Apple Music link: https://music.apple.com/us/album/walkin-blues/1434913280?i=1434913293
Muddy's home wouldn't be the Delta if he didn't cover this classic of the genre, and his rendition holds up just as well as Son House's and Robert Johnson's. In fact, comparing the three is perfect for comparing their very different artistic personalities. Johnson, being the more personal and humble of the three, uses his bouncy glass-shard tone to express solemn frustration while Son House sang like an aggressive preacher with a level of passion that could shatter your mind. Muddy, on the other hand, has the ability to animate his guitar sound to make it sound like a living, breathing predator. This is indeed one of the best displays of his magnificent playing talent with all of those irregular, organic phrasings and the sharp tones he produces. My favorite moment is either around 1:05 when he adds those extra low notes giving a wobbly sonic effect or around 2:00 when those circular progressions sound like a struggling prey desperately trying to escape their predator's grasp. The song, obviously, could not hope for the same effect as "Rollin' Stone" or "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (since this cover is not even remotely as revolutionary as either), but it goes to show that Muddy had finally found the best way to apply his talents, even if it is merely leaving his stamp on a well-known standard.
Verdict: Essential Listening
It is quite an instructive listen to hear his cover of "Walkin' Blues" back-to-back with "Rollin' Stone" and "Rollin' and Tumblin", just to get a feel of how much Muddy was single-handedly laying a whole new vocabulary for blues music to come. While "Walkin' Blues" is a confident harken to the past, "Rollin' Stone" is already looking way forward to new horizons, and even if no artist could quite play the blues like he could, the stakes he upped with the latter would become the baseline level of greatness in the post-war era. Hell, forget the historical context, especially when you have a riff that devours your insides in a way that almost nothing can. This is what dangerous music sounds like folks, and if you're taking a ride on the grittier, grimmer sides of life, there's no better guide through the depths than Mr. McKinley Morganfield.
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