Muddy Waters Quotes

#1. If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.

Muddy Waters

#2. Now that I'm gettin' old enough to get some money, I'd like to have some money. I don't get much made, I need to conquer a big chunk of money. Not quit playin' but quit playin' so hard.

Muddy Waters

#3. Ain't nobody's business, if I bark like a dog.

Muddy Waters

#4. All the kids made their own git-tars. Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn't do much with it, but that's how you learn.

Muddy Waters

#5. The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.

Muddy Waters

#6. I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.

Muddy Waters

#7. China is to stock fraud as Silicon Valley is to technology.

Muddy Waters

#8. My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right

Muddy Waters

#9. I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.

Muddy Waters

#10. Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.

Muddy Waters

#11. I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.

Muddy Waters

#12. Going to Chicago was like going out of the world ...

Muddy Waters

#13. I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.

Muddy Waters

#14. At night in the country, you'd be surprised how that music carries. You could hear my guitar way before you get to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollerin' and screamin'.

Muddy Waters

#15. I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

Muddy Waters

#16. I got your strand of hair, I kiss it day and night.

Muddy Waters

#17. That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.

Muddy Waters

#18. There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.

Muddy Waters

#19. I got that first record out, it came out in '47 ... Then my name began to ring around. I began to take over. From that point, I tell you, Chicago was in my hand, all the more time that those guys had to listen to me.

Muddy Waters

#20. I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.

Muddy Waters

#21. Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.

Muddy Waters

#22. Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.

Muddy Waters

#23. Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

Muddy Waters

#24. My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.

Muddy Waters

#25. Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.

Muddy Waters

#26. Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

Muddy Waters

#27. I was messing around with the harmonica ... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

Muddy Waters

#28. I went down to my baby's house and I sit down on her steps. She said, now come on in now, you know, my husband just left.

Muddy Waters

#29. You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?

Muddy Waters

#30. I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.

Muddy Waters

#31. Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.

Muddy Waters

#32. I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

Muddy Waters

#33. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.

Muddy Waters

#34. The thing about San Francisco is that it has this kind of magical quality.

Muddy Waters

#35. I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

Muddy Waters