Muddy Waters's Stovall Plantation — where Alan Lomax found him

Muddy Waters — McKinley Morganfield — was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1913 and grew up on Stovall Plantation outside Clarksdale, where his grandmother raised him after his mother died. He was playing guitar and harmonica in the Delta tradition by his teenage years, and by his mid-twenties was performing at plantation dances and small local venues, working during the day as a tractor driver and cotton picker on the Stovall land and playing music at night. In August and September 1941, Alan Lomax arrived at Stovall with a recording machine on behalf of the Library of Congress, seeking to document disappearing American folk music.

Lomax recorded Waters performing on the porch of his cabin on the plantation — several songs, including an early version of "Country Blues" — and the encounter changed both men's understanding of what was at stake. For Lomax, Waters was the discovery that justified the entire field recording project: a performer of extraordinary power in an unrecorded tradition. For Waters, hearing himself played back on Lomax's machine was reportedly the first time he understood that his music was something distinct and documentable, separate from the occasion it was played for. He left Mississippi for Chicago two years later, in 1943, and by the early 1950s had invented Chicago electric blues.

The Stovall Plantation cabin where Waters was recorded no longer stands at the original site — it was relocated to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, where it can be visited. The plantation land itself, north of Clarksdale off Stovall Road, remains active agricultural property. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker acknowledges the location. The field recordings Lomax made there in 1941 are among the most historically significant audio documents in American music.