Muddy Waters’ “Hard Again”: When Mud Smoked

The subject of countless blues songs is the singer’s personal money woes, a misfortune most likely unknown to the townsfolk of posh Westport, CT, where the average sale price for a single-family home hit $2.3 million in 2025.  But from 1977 through 1980, Muddy Waters and guitarist/producer Johnny Winter turned the tony town into a temporary blues bastion when they recorded three Muddy albums (Hard Again, I’m Ready, and King Bee) at The Schoolhouse, a studio at guitarist Dan Hartman’s Westport home.

In 1977, Waters’ fans were pleased to learn that Winter’s stellar work produced an album that saw Mr. Mojo rising to #143 in Billboard’s Top 200, an anomaly for a blues artist.  And even though the LP’s sales pale in comparison to legendary albums released in 1977 like Rumours, Saturday Night Fever, and Aja, musicians were sold on Muddy’s bawdy Hard Again.

AC-DC’s Angus Young noted of the record’s cool “Bus Driver” song:  “I’ve always liked the happy sort of blues music, like Muddy Waters. Even though he might have been singing about his woman running off with a nineteen year-old bus driver from Florida, there would be an element of humor in it, and that’s what I’ve always loved.”

Angus would appreciate the possible origin of the album’s title.  As detailed in author Robert Gordon’s excellent 2002 biography, Can’t Be Satisifed: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, after Muddy heard a playback of one of the album’s songs, he cracked: “Hearing that makes my little pee pee hard again.”

 

The LP, which won a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording, blasts off with a song that could be the only “answer song” where one of its composers answers himself.  Bo Diddley replied to his own “I’m a Man” by co-writing with Muddy and Mel London “Mannish Boy.”

In Muddy’s third rendition of Bo’s tune, which opens the album, he lets listeners know right off the bat that this isn’t the serviceable blues fare that Waters had been pouring out for the last decade.  Instead, the album’s LOUD, monoaural-like sound is reminiscent of records made by the Sonics or The Dave Clark Five.

Guitarist Bob Margolin, the last surviving musician of the Westport sessions, attributed the aural roar to their surroundings.  He recalled on his Facebook page: “Johnny loved the old Blues records that inspired him and was frustrated with modern recordings that seemed to lose their soul and excitement. The Westport studio was a large, warm-sounding room of painted wood. In contrast to most recordings from those days, all of the musicians played at the same time in the same room. There were no isolation booths and relatively little baffling between the drums, piano, and the separate instrument amplifiers. The only drawback of the studio was that the control room was upstairs from the studio room, rather than separated from it only by glass as with most studios. Johnny was playing guitar on every song, but he had to switch to his producer role and climb those stairs, probably several dozen times and then descend to play again each of the three days we recorded. I remember mid-30’s Johnny remarking that those stairs were getting old.”

But if Muddy was still under contract to Chess Records in 1976, the seven-man band would have never been assembled.  Chess had sadly become a “record reissue company” and stopped releasing new material.  Muddy was now free to sign with any label.

Enter Johnny Winter.

Winter was one of many musicians to claim he was Muddy’s #1 fan.  Waters’ son, Joseph Morganfield, remembers, “We taped phone calls that he would get on his birthdays because you’d have the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton calling. It was weird to pick up the phone and have some British guy on the phone.”

But while some Brits were figuring out how to co-opt Muddy’s music without paying him, Winter once figured out how he could make a record with his idol.  Johnny convinced Muddy to sign with his manager’s (Steve Paul) newly formed Blue Sky label, an imprint of Columbia.  The end result could be heard in Hard Again’s grooves.  Muddy’s manager, Scott Cameron, noticed and noted, “Johnny inspired Muddy’s band to push Muddy. Johnny was, at that point, straight as an arrow and fun to work with. You’d see Muddy and him feed off each other with this excitement going from level to level to level because they’d just keep pulling each other higher.”

Filmmakers were well aware of the raw power of Hard Again, with “Mannish Boy” popping up in key scenes in Risky Business and in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Casino, and The Color of Money. Muddy could strongly relate to the sexually charged lyrics, as the ever-affable Muddy had eyes for plenty of women.  He was involved in four paternity cases, and the total number of children he sired is still unclear.  Muddy became an honest and married man in 1979 (for the third time) when at the age of 66, he married Marva Jean Brooks, 25. Eric Clapton served as his best man.  Muddy died four years later at the age of 70, a “hard man” to the end.

-Mark Daponte

Fair use image from Hard Again