Sallie Bengtson, president of Nola Blue Records, announces the signing of Mud Morganfield, acclaimed son of Blues legend Muddy Waters, and will release his label debut album, Deep Mud, on September 26th. Deep Mud will be available in digital format, as well as on CD and limited-edition red vinyl, with distribution by MVD Distribution.
Mud will celebrate the new album’s release with a show on September 27th (his birthday) at Chicago-area club Hey Nonny, in Arlington Heights, Illinois (https://www.heynonny.com/).
"It is such a privilege to release the aptly titled, Deep Mud," says Sallie Bengtson about the Mud Morganfield signing. "Drawing from a great reservoir of paternal musical heritage combined with a lifetime of maternal nurturing, Mud and his music are grounded in respect and love. He honors his roots while also advancing his legacy of the Chicago electric blues sound."
"I'm always writing and thinking about music. The songs on this album are from the past year, which was a really hard time for me," reflects Mud Morganfield. "My life changed forever when the doctor told us they couldn't do anything else for my mother. We lost her in March. She was my biggest supporter from day one. Her love is the music in my heart."
“For the last couple of decades, Mud has followed in his beloved dad’s mammoth footsteps, staunchly keeping the traditional Chicago blues flame alight by faithfully singing Muddy’s songs as well as plenty of his own originals in front of an all-star band of local heavy-hitters,” writes Bill Dahl in the album’s liner notes. “Recently, he hit the main stage at the 2025 Chicago Blues Festival to belt his father’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” as one of the main cogs in a gala celebration of Chess Records’ 75th anniversary, looking and sounding every bit the heir to Muddy’s gilded throne.”
Recorded at JoyRide Studio in Chicago, Deep Mud is real, honest, unvarnished blues from front to back, the way Muddy himself proudly did it during the genre’s hallowed heyday as he laid the bedrock foundation for the electric Chicago blues ensemble approach. “Listen, man, it is Chicago blues. No rock-blues here for Mud,” he states. I talk and I sing about real things, real live people, real situations, things that people go through, from falling in love to beautiful women. So, it’s Chicago blues at its best. They ain’t trying to do that no more, but that’s what it is.”
That deeply-held commitment to Chicago blues tradition defines Deep Mud. Except for two lovingly rendered Chess-era Muddy revivals (“Country Boy” and “Strange Woman”), Mud’s originals dominate the hard-hitting set. As usual, his studio cohorts were the cream of the crop (many of whom have played on Mud’s previous albums): guitarists Rick Kreher (an integral member of Waters’ last touring band) and Mike Wheeler, keyboardists Roosevelt “Mad Hatter” Purifoy and Sumito “Ariyo” Ariyoshi, bassist E.G. McDaniel, and drummer Melvin “Pookie Styx” Carlisle lay down tough, uncompromising grooves loaded with timeless Windy City tradition. Harpist Studebaker John filled multiple roles as Mud’s producer and arranger, with trumpeter Phil Perkins arranging the horns.
“The album wouldn’t sound like it sounds without Studebaker John’s ears,” notes Mud. “The man has a fantastic ear.”
About Mud Morganfield
Everything in Mud’s musical life traces directly back to his father. “Dad played the most important role with my being. He shared an affair with my mother, and they had me!” he says. “I was born in the blues, man. I used to have to tap music on the side of my head before I went to sleep, man. I’ve had music running through my being all my life, since I’ve been here.”
Mud’s mother, Mildred McGhee, was Muddy’s girlfriend during the blues legend’s glory years at Chess Records. Early in Mud’s life, he and his mother lived on Chicago’s South Side in a building located around 46th and Greenwood owned by Joseph Chess, father of Chess bosses Leonard and Phil Chess. “We stayed in there for a while, and I used to see Bo Diddley, Wolf, and all these guys. But I was still a kid. I didn’t know who they were. We’d pass ‘em in the hallway,” he says. “Huge building, a lot of apartments. I really think it was Muddy’s rendezvous spot. I think it was Muddy’s little getaway spot. But I used to see all those guys in there, man. I didn’t know nothing about who they were.” Muddy and his wife Geneva lived nearby at 43rd Street and South Lake Park Avenue.
Mud’s recording career began in 2008 with the self-produced Fall Waters Fal, and he commenced a lengthy stint on Severn Records in 2012 with his acclaimed CD, Son of the Seventh Son. He was back in 2014 with For Pops—A Tribute to Muddy Waters, a collaboration with celebrated harmonica ace Kim Wilson that found the singer digging deeply into his father’s Chess-era catalog. “That’s the killer, man, that album,” notes Mud. “Listen, you won’t find nobody to get that close to my dad, other than me!” Morganfield concluded his Severn hookup with 2018’s They Call Me Mud, releasing his most recent disc, the 2022 CD Portrait, on Delmark.
There was also a 2016 album on the Big imprint, Way Down Inside: Songs of Willie Dixon, that saw Morganfield sharing a studio with Big Head Todd and the Monsters (Ronnie Baker Brooks and Erica Brown were also on board). The set spawned a cross-country tour that Mud remembers with great fondness.
Mud Morganfield has toured all over the world during his more than two decades of performing, including repeated visits to England as well as Italy, Russia and China. No matter where he travels, Mud’s regal bloodlines inevitably factor heavily into his onstage set list.
Chicago’s rough anyway, I don’t care how you cut it. But I tell folks all the time, I wouldn’t want to change that,” he says. Morganfield attended Harrison High School. “I didn’t graduate. But I went and got my GED and I went over to Malcolm X College and picked up a degree, and I went to DeVry Institute,” says Mud. “I started driving trucks for J.B. Hunt. As a matter of fact, I retired from them. I drove for J.B. about eight years, but I drove for other outfits.”
As Mud grew up, Waters was there to help his offspring in any-and-all of his musical endeavors. “I started out as a drummer,” says Mud. “I’d get a set of drums from Dad—first the little paper ones. I would tear them up, and then a couple of weeks later he’d get me another pair. And he finally got me a real set with some tougher skins. And one day, I don’t know, I was about 16 years old, I went to an Earth, Wind & Fire concert. I saw Verdine White playing bass, and that did it. That did it, man. I put the drums down, and I’ve been playing the bass secretly at least 30-something years now.
“I played with a couple little bands in my neighborhood, garage bands, so to speak. No big deal. I remember as a young man—I was a little older then, about 23 years old—I used to try to sing Tyrone Davis songs, Johnnie Taylor songs. But it kept sounding like Muddy Waters. I don’t care what I sing, man, it’s gonna come out like Father’s. And I just said, ‘Hey, I can’t run.’ I couldn’t run no more. I couldn’t keep running, man. I have to get in where I fit in. I have to do what God put me here to do.”
Despite his longstanding interest in the blues, Mud was a late bloomer as a professional musician, not emerging on the local scene with his burnished pipes until the 2000s. Veteran blues chanteuse Mary Lane gave him some of his earliest showcases on the West Side. “When you didn’t see me, I was getting my blues. I didn’t want to be an artist that could just play the blues or sing the blues. I had to have some blues of my own to sing about,” he says. “That’s why when folks ask me, ‘Where you been, man? Your dad passed in ‘83.’ Well, I had to get some blues, man. Look, you don’t just get up—and Dad told them this—you don’t just get up and go outside and say, ‘Look at me—I’m a bluesman!’ You’ve got to go through something, fight for survival.
“I don’t care if you can play blues. You’ve got to have some blues, man. So that’s what I was doing—getting my blues.”
It’s safe to say that Muddy would be proud of the way Mud Morganfield is carrying on the family tradition. “That was my main goal, just to do that,” Mud says. “I didn’t get a chance to really show him because he had passed, but I hope if there’s a place we go when we leave here and he can still visualize or see us back down here, I want him to say that: ‘I’m proud of him!’”
Social Media Links: Mud Morganfield -
Nola Blue Records - @nolabluerecords on Facebook and www.nola-blue.com
Mud Morganfield Deep Mud Track Listing and Credits
Bring Me My Whiskey (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Big Frame Woman (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Strange Woman – (McKinley Morganfield, Ralph Bass © Watertoons Music, Padua Music Co)
Don’t Leave Me (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
She’s Getting Her Groove On (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Ernestine (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Strike Like Lightning (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Cosigner Man (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Lover Man (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
In and Out of My Life (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
The Man That You’re With (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Carolina (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
Country Boy – (McKinley Morganfield © Watertoons Music)
A Dream Walking (Mud Morganfield ©Pops Daisy Entertainment)
