No, this isn’t the story of Blues music on America’s highest mountain, this is the story of influential blues musician McKinley Morganfield, a virtuoso of slide guitar.

Slide guitar is also known a bottleneck guitar because bottlenecks were the first materials used to produce the effect. Normally a guitar player varies the pitch of notes by pressing a string down against a fret. Slide guitar players place a slide across the strings and move it along without lifting, creating continuous changes in pitch, sometimes in addition to using their free fingers to fret the guitar, sometimes not. The chords available are limited, so many musicians, including Mr Morganfield, use open tuning, a technique where the guitar strings are tuned to a particular chord (often D-G-d-g-b-d) which then changes key as the slide moves up and down the neck of the guitar. The origin of the technique is not clear. There is an Indian instrument, the Vichitra Veena which is played with a slide, as are many African one stringed instruments, though these don’t share the challenges of slide guitar where strings which are playing the ‘wrong’ notes have to be muted.

Robert Johnson was one of the early influential guitarists to use the slide technique, but slide guitar couldn’t be contained and burst from the acoustic world to electric guitar with the early blues musicians, and particularly with McKinley Morganfield who really brought the sound to electric guitar. “I Cant Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” were recorded in Chicago in 1948 and became hits for Mr Morganfield, bringing him a long way from his birth in Mississippi and early days as a field hand. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard the name, it may be because you know the nickname better, McKinley Morganfield was better known as Muddy Waters.

Born in 1913 and raised by his Grandmother in Clarksdale Mississippi,