Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield grew up on Stovall Plantation in the Mississippi Delta and was first recorded there playing acoustic country blues by Alan Lomax and John Work for the Library of Congress in 1941. He moved to Chicago in 1943 and switched to electric guitar to cut through noisy clubs; pushed by a full band, his country blues became Chicago blues — the sound that Chess Records put on disc and that British rock bands later treated as scripture. Records like “Rollin’ Stone” gave a British band its name and, more broadly, handed rock and roll much of its vocabulary. He died in 1983.