“Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters first cut "Mannish Boy" in 1955 as his reply to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", itself a spin on Waters and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man". Beneath the swagger and the boasting, listeners heard something bigger: a man who had just left the South for Chicago demanding to be called a man, never a boy.

On Electric Mud in 1968, producers Marshall Chess, Charles Stepney and Gene Barge turn it loose with a heavier, electrified band: Pete Cosey, Roland Faulkner and Phil Upchurch on guitars, Stepney on organ, Barge on tenor sax, Louis Satterfield on upright bass and Morris Jennings on drums. The one-chord, stop-time stomp is still the spine, but now it throbs and swirls around Muddy's voice, which hasn't lost an ounce of its authority.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.