He had some hits after this collection: Mannish Boy, The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll, and Champaign and Reefer with the Rolling Stones. Despite those not having those later arrivals, this is great record.
When my roommate played it for me in 1969, he said the line in I’m Ready was ‘Hope some schoolboy wants a fight.’ He made a crack about the backlash against hippies. I have better speakers now, and I say it is ‘screwball.’ There weren’t any schoolboys in blues clubs in the 1950s to punch. The line before that is a favorite—‘I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite.’ I said that when I was slamming down bar gin, and no one ever stepped back. It’s the singer, not the song. In Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy said he had $700; that’s $8000 today. Can’t say I’ve tried that in a bar.
Muddy wasn’t the kind of guy who expected an exclusive relationship with a lover. In Honey Bee he says ‘I don’t mind you sailing/but please don’t sail too long.’ In Still a Fool, he says, ‘I been crazy, oh, all my life/well, I done fell in love/with another man’s wife.’ In I Just Want to Make Love to You, he says ‘I don’t want you to be true/I just want to make love to you.’ Also: ‘I don’t want you because I’m sad and blue,’ good to know before you get serious. In Standing Around Crying, he says ‘Oh baby, I ain’t gonna be riding you around in my automobile/you got so many men/that I’m afraid you may get me killed.’ Me, I’d have given Muddy Waters the Nobel in Literature.
converselyspeaking 