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 Ri ...