"I Feel Like Going Home" Chicago Blues

The song I chose for my final project this week is “I Feel Like Going Home” by Muddy Waters. I love his guitar playing. It is as if he and the guitar are singing their own parts of the song. This song, for me, represents the Chicago Blues entirely with its electric blues sound and the lamenting quality from the blues origins. I made Muddy Waters blue to symbolize his major influence on the Chicago blues scene with his telecaster red guitar as the second color. The darkness is either engulfing him or he is escaping the darkness, which is the blues.

Muddy Waters, as his name tells, was from the Mississippi delta, played there, and was also recorded by Alan Lomax, but it was in Chicago where he began recording music. I thought this was interesting that he was discovered in the city rather than from the recordings the Lomax’s did, like other musicians who became well known from their country roots. His success in the city is probably from the delta blues background he had mixed with the new energy from the urban environment to create songs that made Muddy Waters unique and appealed to the Chicago music world. In my research I found that his style of music is not only urban blues but called electric blues too since each song was not an acoustic version (like so many of our other blues songs). After his death he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame… this makes me wonder how close electric blues and rock and roll sound? After listening to Muddy Waters’s songs it seems that the sound specifically is what ties these genres together, not the meanings.

The youtube video of Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man” has a very showman like quality to it and the sound is very full. This is different from the Lomax recording that can have a single person singing with one instrument or no instruments at all. I would call the Chicago blues a plugged in and on-stage version of the rural blues.

Muddy Waters's guitar - a telecaster

Little Walter is also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! I see why the blues were turning more rock and roll sounding; it is because of the electrification of instruments. Little Walter was famous for his harmonica playing because he was one of the initial people who began amplifying it by holding it up to the microphone. Muddy Waters and Little Walter had also recorded and played songs together.

“Blues With a Feeling” might be about having the blues mixed with a love-filled passion to get his love back, or find her. He sings about his love living somewhere else… perhaps he is really feeling the way his lover feels when he moved to Chicago? And unknowingly singing about his blues but truly he knows how is absence affects the girl.

Howlin’ Wolf also began in the country blues scene and translocated himself to the city. He even looked up to singers like Charlie Patton and learned the blues from local musicians. Howlin’ Wolf had done performances and signed on with a record company and soon after traveled to Chicago. “Sittin’ On Top of the World” is one of his songs, which now listening to it compared to when we heard it quite a few weeks ago, has to completely different visual in my mind. I used think of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” as a song for the impoverished people living in the rural country suffering the Great Depression. Now it has changed with Howlin’ Wolf’s place in Chicago, although he travelled there later… “Sittin’ On Top of the World” can be seen as a song about overcoming the difficulties that can be found no matter where someone calls home… country or city.

In Howlin’ Wolf’s song, “Little Red Rooster,” is an interesting song especially because of his unique style of playing and singing. I would guess that Howlin’ Wolf’s name was born from his vocals, the power in his voice is rather wolf-like. Since the rooster usually represents males, and he sings about it needing to be found and go home to the barn. I feel that a majority of the Chicago city songs have to do with the place the singers have come from and are currently now. They always seem to wish to go home. For example, Muddy Waters’s “Feel Like Going Home.” The rooster might represent this desire? But the visuals provided in this song with so many warm colors like the red rooster and barn are not as “blue” as the genre they are sung as, providing a stark contrast.

Howlin' Wolf playing the harmonica.

“How Many More Years” in the video where the Rolling Stones introduce Howlin’ Wolf brings back what I touched on earlier where the blues and rock and roll are merged in urban blues. This changes the rural blues to appeal to city folk and popularize the songs further with the sounds from all of the instruments.

In the video where only Howlin’ Wolf is performing the song in the beginning he says, “any time you thinkin’ evil, you’ve got the blues,” which is one of the truest statements I’ve ever heard.