Mud Morganfield — Deep Mud

Isn’t DNA quite the prankster?

Case in point: An aura surrounds him wherever he roams. It’s both a DIY and an inherited aura. That’s because Mud Morganfield is both history in the making as well as walking history. What’s the simplest way you can tell? Hand the 71-year-old Chicagoan a microphone and listen to him devour a blues.

Cue up Deep Mud. Close your eyes and spin, say, “Ernestine” or “Bring Me My Whiskey,” the leadoff track with the slide-guitar tantrums. And then pay attention to the telltale vocal tone. Soak up how lyrics are precisely phrased; the way pitch gets selectively calibrated to shade words; how syllables can get shaken out, lingered upon, hammered down or blown up. The audible combination serves as a uniquely identifying fingerprint. (Well, almost.) Ring any bells? Remind you of anyone?

It’s uncanny. Downright spooky at times how that voice can sound like a long-distance call coming in from the momentous past. Because, through the molecular magic of genetics, Mud can stand in as a vocal double for his father, who, incidentally, also was a Chicago bluesman. His name was McKinley Morganfield.

Or best known to everyone around the world as Muddy Waters.

Sure, you’re likely to hear a song or two along the way that once belonged to his dad—except 2014’s For Pops: A Tribute to Muddy Waters that completely indulged. But as anyone who has heard any of the six or so albums leading up to Deep Mud knows, Mud Morganfield—not to be confused with Big Bill Morganfield, another of Muddy’s sons who has taken up the family business—is his own man, setting his own course.

He’s an avid songwriter. So much so that this year’s productive in-Chicago session kicked out 14 songs. Twelve of them belong to Mud himself; the other two trace to Muddy. Like father like son, the new, original material typically centers around sex or the pursuit thereof. “Lover Man” is certainly not alone in its frame of mind within a robust set likewise inhabited by a shimmy-shaking “Big Frame Woman” and the ooh-wee “Carolina.” Mud saves his softer singing for “In and Out of My Life,” a ballad cushioned all the more by the cooing of satiny-throated backup singers.

Unlike Muddy with a guitar strapped over his shoulder, Mud is a bassist by denomination. Motivation to thump thick strings stemmed from a concert spent mesmerized by watching Verdine White at work. Yes, the epicenter of Earth, Wind & Fire’s funk. Here, however, Mud abdicates duties to seasoned bassist E.G. McDaniel (Byther Smith, Jimmy Burns) on all but the slowly sloshing “Strange Woman,” an heirloom from his father’s Chess Records era. As for guitar, Mud encircles himself with a pair of fretsmen—Rick Kreher (Muddy Waters, Tail Dragger) and Mike Wheeler (Jimmy Johnson)—who, when needed, can channel Muddy’s patented means of making bottlenecked strings bellow. “The Man That You’re With” and “Strike Like Lightning” do just that.

The rest of the veteran band, who can similarly play Chicago blues in their sleep, always does him right. Pianist/organist Roosevelt Purifoy (Lurrie Bell, Carlos Johnson) and drummer Melvin “Pooky Styx” Carlisle (Jimmy Johnson) are among the ranks, as is the session’s ubiquitous harpist, “Studebaker John” Grimaldi. The Chicago native is a singing and harping slide-guitarist in his own right since the 1970s, having been schooled by Maxwell Street’s rowdiest, wildest sliders: J.B. Hutto and Hound Dog Taylor. He also produced the hourlong Deep Mud.

So what Mud began in 2008 with Fall Waters Fall continues snowballing with an approach both current and timeless. The aforementioned “Ernestine” is a steamroller whose density draws in a chattering piano and a harmonica that bends some of its final notes long and low to the point of breaking. Yet the danceable, horn-happy “She’s Getting Her Groove On” is not what you’d expect to hear filling the hallowed space inside holdups like Pepper’s, Silvio’s or the 708 Club—Muddy’s haunts in the 1950s. “Cosigner Man,” the only other track riffed by trumpet, is likewise a bright floor filler. Agreed, Muddy, Brass & the Blues unexpectedly pitted the South Side man against an uptown horn section. But unlike that 1966 experiment which lacked a natural fit into Muddy’s established brand, Mud’s brassy collaboration does work due to the leeway within his own more accommodating trademark that bridges now and then.

And that’s the point: There is so much more looking ahead than looking behind—no matter how deep, rich, tempting and proud Mud’s handed-down past is.

That said, for maximum déjà-vu chills, enter the time warp titled “Country Boy.” These five minutes are where that DNA impishly struts its stuff the boldest, rekindling a song so good that Muddy cut it twice, both plugged (1951) and unplugged (1963). The Deep Mud version hugs the earlier, electrified arrangement, greenlighting Studebaker John to continually strafe the bottlenecked crawl as did Little Walter while Mud makes the case, line by line, for the narrator’s bravado. That, along with his own personal case for being a master at delivering a line, any line, with character and power befitting someone drinkin’ TNT and smokin’ dynamite.

Label: Nola Blue Records

Release date: 9/26/25

Artist website: Mud Morganfield blues.com

Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski