I love Muddy Waters and his music, "Mannish Boy" is timeless. Gordon's biography, unhappily, simply tells me more than I care to know about the day-to-day details of Waters' life. The context of Muddy's origins and the environment of the growth of the Chicago blues genre is welcome. I now know enough about fish fries in the Muddy Waters household to last me for the rest of my life, and beyond. Sadly, I didn't finish the book. ( )

A good, informative, and engaging chronicle of Muddy's life, career, and influence on other musicians though I would have appreciated a deeper discussion of his approach to music and what made his unique from other blues artists who were his contemporaries. ( )

Maybe one of the best musicians biography ever wrote and certainly the definitive look into McKinley Morganfield's life.

After reading the boring, cliché foreword by Keith Richards and getting a few pages into the first chapter we immediately notice how much time and effort the author invested, doing a great work of investigation that becomes obvious when you see its almost 200 pages of appendixes, notes and bibliography.

This book discovered me some recordings that I, for some reason, managed to miss and many aspects of Muddy's life that I never heard of, Muddy's and many of his friends and "blues colleages" (Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, Otis Spann and many more), because this book isn't only about Muddy, it's about the Blues and everything that come with it: about black people, musical legacy, the racist south, life in the delta, the Great Migration, industrial Chicago... etc. Also this biography talks not only about the character but the music as well. This may appears as a somehow dumb observation but, sadly, it's a very common practice in this kind of books to center exclusively in the persona and completely ignore the music, which is a main aspect in their lives.

I finished the book loving even more Muddy's legacy and with a renewed opinion about the character.

The only (small) thing I can complain about is the small amount of photos. ( )