MUDDY WATERS at THE LAST WALTZ!
‘Mannish Boy’
I love this song and it took me a long time to get to understand it . . . . . being a variation upon Willie Dixon’s ‘Hoochie Coochie Man' and other sexual pleas to the adoration of women it has often been suggested that it is merely aggressively sexist but I don’t see it like that . . . . any more, if I ever did (well you might say, I would say that!) but still it makes me smile and the plea for a 'John The Conquerer root' and such voodoo hoodoo that Dr John might well have sung it (if he didn’t!?), it continues a tradition of singing the power of love for women, the Voodoo Chile, the Back Door Man the Crawling King Snake of the blues! It is also funny! “I can make love to a woman in five minutes time!” it is all here! It is an old old song, written when I was born, a blues standard written by Muddy Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley (with Waters and Diddley being credited under their birth names - Morganfield, London and McDaniels) it remains a plea to the opposite sex and her adoration (sic!)but it is also a response in the fifties to black men being called “boy” by white slave owners and white populations of the deep south generally and thus asserting their manhood and standing proud to call oneself “Mannish Boy!"
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