The Blues Professor, Part 2: Muddy Waters, the Mardi Gras Indians, and Where to Start with the Blues

Muddy Waters, the Mardi Gras Indians, Blind Willie McTell, and the one record to start with: the second half of Thomas Stubbs's conversation with Rich Pettit, the man Atlanta knows as the Blues Professor.In Part 1 we traced the blues out of West Africa and up the East Coast. This half starts back home in New Orleans — where Rich grew up — and the city's living traditions: the second line, the jazz funeral that walks to the cemetery on a dirge and home on a parade, and the Mardi Gras Indians, with Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas and the Neville Brothers and the Meters threaded through it.Then the heart of it: Blind Willie McTell's "Dying Crapshooter's Blues" — a song a dying gambler dictated to a blind street singer, who carried it back to Atlanta and made it last. Rich calls it one of the cleverest pieces of writing in the blues, and it's hard to argue.And at the end, the question you put to anyone who really knows: if you're starting from nothing, where do you go first? Rich's answer is Muddy Waters — which takes us to The Last Waltz, one camera on Muddy alone, doing "Mannish Boy," killing it.Groundwater is the companion podcast to Thomas Stubbs's book Race Records: The Lie That Split American Music — and the Blues That Ran Underneath. More at groundwater.fm.MusicTheme — "Guitar Rag," Sylvester Weaver (OKeh, 1923). Public domain."N.O. Bounce," Big Freedia. Excerpted as commentary under fair use."Dying Crapshooter's Blues," Blind Willie McTell — Library of Congress field recording, Atlanta, 1940 (John A. Lomax, Archive of American Folk Song). Excerpted as commentary under fair use."Mannish Boy," Muddy Waters with The Band, from The Last Waltz (Warner Bros., 1978). Excerpted as commentary under fair use.