Today’s Artist
Muddy Waters 1913 – 1983
The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.
Muddy Waters took the Mississippi Delta blues to Chicago, plugged in an electric guitar, and created the sound that became modern blues. Songs like I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man and Mannish Boy defined the Chicago blues sound. He influenced everybody from the Rolling Stones to Jimi Hendrix. More →
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Who Did It Better
Lately
Lately I've had the strangest feeling
1981 Stevie Wonder
1994 Jodeci
Stevie wrote about a love already ended where the narrator kept hoping while knowing the whole truth. Jodeci sang the same confession at whisper volume. The conversation was over and finished. The hoping felt younger, more desperate, less ready to accept what was already finished.
Today’s Record
He's The Greatest Dancer
He's the greatest dancer, that I've ever seen
She took the stage in a gown that looked like it was made of midnight. 30 sec opens with a Rhodes piano that breathes rather than plays. Anita Baker doesn't belt. She doesn't need to. Every note is placed like someone setting a table for company she's been waiting to feed. The song won a Grammy.
Number eight on the Hot 100. A voice that didn't ask for your attention. It assumed it.
Today’s Theme
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You’re Kidding, Right
Muddy Waters -- born McKinley Morganfield on a Mississippi plantation, he didn't pick up a guitar until he was 17 -- started on harmonica, working the same cotton fields his granddaddy was enslaved in. From those fields came the sound that electrified the world.
The man who plugged the Delta blues into an amplifier and changed everything grew up barefoot in the dirt.
Soul in the Movies
Animal House 1978
Animal House didn't just use soul music. It weaponized it. Sam Cooke's 'Wonderful World' -- the most romantic song ever written -- plays as the punchline to Bluto smashing a folk singer's guitar against a stairwell. The film understood what studios forgot: the right song at the wrong moment is funnier than any joke.
Wonderful world. The guitar didn't agree. 