Muddy Waters electrified the Delta blues and created the sound that launched the British Invasion. He didn't need to cross the Atlantic -- the Atlantic crossed to him. McKinley Morganfield grew up on Stovall Plantation, playing acoustic blues on the front porch. Then he moved to Chicago and plugged the whole thing into an amplifier. The South Side never sounded the same.

He built a band that was a machine: Little Walter on harmonica, Otis Spann on piano, Willie Dixon writing the songs, and Muddy out front with that slide guitar and that voice like the Mississippi River at flood stage. The Rolling Stones took their name from his song Rollin' Stone. Led Zeppelin lifted whole sections of his catalog. When he toured England in 1958, they booed him for playing electric. Ten years later, every British band was trying to sound exactly like him.

Mannish Boy. Hoochie Coochie Man. I Just Want to Make Love to You. The songs were built on riffs and bravado, but underneath was a man who'd picked cotton and seen the worst of Jim Crow and decided he wasn't going to be small for anyone. He won Grammy after Grammy in his later years. He played the White House. He mentored Buddy Guy. He died in his sleep at 68. The Blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.

Muddy Waters had survived the plantation, the South Side, and the indifference of an industry that wanted to keep the blues in a museum. He refused. When he died at 68, he'd outlasted almost everyone he came up with. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds -- they all owed him. He knew it. They knew it. The blues plugged in because Muddy Waters decided it should.