“Rollin' Stone” by Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters cut "Rollin' Stone" in 1950, and it's his reading of "Catfish Blues", a Delta tune whose roots run back to 1920s Mississippi. Fishing and catfish songs had been swimming around the blues for years before he got there: in 1941 Tommy McClennan and Robert Petway both recorded versions, and Petway's, the first to go by "Catfish Blues", sometimes gets named as the source. Still, a Waters biographer makes the case that nobody in the Delta had ever made the old song sound like this.

Leonard Chess produced it for Chess Records. A year later Waters reused the same arrangement and melody for "Still a Fool", which went to number nine on Billboard's R&B chart, and plenty of other artists have recorded "Rollin' Stone" since.

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