William Big Bill Morganfield is the son of McKinley Morganfield, known to the world as Muddy Waters, but this episode is about the decades he spent refusing the shortcut that name offered. Born in Chicago in 1956 and raised in southern Florida by his grandmother, Morganfield grew up on the Jackson 5 and James Brown, earned an English degree from Tuskegee and a communications degree from Auburn, and settled into life as a teacher. Only after his father’s death in 1983 did he pick up the guitar seriously, spending six years learning the instrument as an adult before a well-received gig with Lonnie Mack at Center Stage in Atlanta.

Rather than ride that momentum, he went back to teaching and studying traditional blues forms until he emerged in 1996 at the Blue Angel Cafe in Chattanooga with the Stone Cold Blues Band. His 1999 Blind Pig debut Rising Sun was recorded in Chicago with Paul Oscher, Willie Big Eyes Smith and Pinetop Perkins from his father’s band, and won him the W.C. Handy Award for Best New Blues Artist in 2000. We also cover the unauthorized 1997 German release of his demos as 19 Years Old, later albums Ramblin’ Mind and Born Lover, his tours of Spain with guitarist Max Drake, and his 2024 role as a blues musician in the Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown.

• Why a Florida childhood and an academic career kept him clear of his father’s shadow
• How grief, not ambition, pushed him toward the guitar in his late twenties
• The decision to walk away after a successful Atlanta gig and keep building competence
• What it meant for Muddy’s former sidemen to co-sign his debut album
• Balancing original songs like Strong Man Holler with Got My Mojo Working for European crowds