Muddy Waters - I’m A King Bee - ChicagoFest 1981

In August of 1981, when the undisputed king of Chicago blues headlined ChicagoFest — then the Windy City’s top outdoor music festival — for two nights, his loyal subjects mobbed Navy Pier on the lakefront to hear one of the greatest innovators the idiom had ever produced. Muddy Waters led the charge in the late 1940s and early ’50s to electrify Delta blues in an urban setting. His peerless combo would include such future stars as ace guitarist Jimmy Rogers, harmonica virtuoso Little Walter and piano wizard Otis Spann. But Muddy was always at the center of the action. His gruff, authoritative vocal delivery and slashing slide guitar define the purest form of postwar Chicago blues. Waters’ charisma was as immense as his musical vision. Born April 4, 1915, in Issaquena County, Mississippi, McKinley Morganfield learned the blues while sharecropping on Stovall Plantation. One guitarist particula