I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.
Muddy Waters

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.
Muddy Waters

I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.
Muddy Waters

I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.
Muddy Waters

I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.
Muddy Waters

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?
Muddy Waters

I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.
Muddy Waters

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.
Muddy Waters

I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.
Muddy Waters

I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.
Muddy Waters


If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.
Muddy Waters

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.
Muddy Waters

My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.
Muddy Waters

Now that I'm gettin' old enough to get some money, I'd like to have some money. I don't get much made, I need to conquer a big chunk of money. Not quit playin' but quit playin' so hard.
Muddy Waters

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.
Muddy Waters

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
Muddy Waters

Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.
Muddy Waters

Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.
Muddy Waters

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.
Muddy Waters

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
Muddy Waters