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.

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.

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.

You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.

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.

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.

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.

If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

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.

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.

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.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ain't nobody's business, if I bark like a dog.

Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.