Rolfboy,That's an interesting little tale about Muddy Waters there, I came to the blues through the rather odd combination of Irish folk and Hendrix initially. Especially as Hendrix often covered blues songs live-when I read about his influences I wanted to hear them to of course. I agree with a comment he made once about Irish music and blues having a certain ammount of things in common. Sadly, he is not really seen as a blues player, BB King commented on that once to the fact that yes he was, and a damn fine one as did John Lee Hooker.
You can imagine BTW how strange people in a London college thought Son House was in 1991, when I was first listening to him and Johnson, Waters, Wolf, Leadbelly etc -comments along the line of, "what's this scratchy old crap?" were sadly rather frequent.
Marcus