Stovall, August 1941

In 1941 the Library of Congress and Fisk University in Nashville launch a study of the lives and music of Black residents of Coahoma County, around Clarksdale. The team includes Alan Lomax, a twenty-six-year-old white folklorist, and John Work III, a composer and Fisk professor who was one of the great Black scholars of American folk music.

They bring a portable disc recorder, heavy and delicate. They are looking for Robert Johnson, unaware that he died three years earlier. On Stovall plantation, someone tells them about a man who plays guitar with a bottleneck on his finger: McKinley Morganfield, a tractor driver who throws parties at his house at night.

They record him in that same house. He plays Country Blues and I Be's Troubled. When they play the disc back, he hears his own voice for the first time. Muddy Waters would later say that was the day he realized he could sing as well as anybody. Months later, two copies of the record arrive in the mail with a check for twenty dollars. He keeps them like treasure.

In the summer of 1942 Lomax returns to Stovall and records him again. A year later, Muddy takes the train to Chicago.

The Coahoma study went unpublished for many years, and for decades Lomax's name overshadowed those of the Fisk researchers. The notes of John Work and his colleagues were not published until 2005. The story of how Muddy Waters was discovered has its B side too.