Mannish Boy (1955) – Muddy Waters (The Last Waltz)

Muddy Waters’ performance of Mannish Boy in The Last Waltz concert is spectacular. The Last Waltz is the best rock film I’ve ever seen, and Martin Scorsese deserves so many plaudits for his dedication to capture this monumental concert. Muddy’s voice is so powerful, and he makes it all look so effortless. Mannish Boy as presented here seems a paramount moment in the history of Blues. It oozes soul. I’ve watched this concert so many times and it never gets old.

SirStrongBad wrote on YT: When working on The Last Waltz, camera operators were instructed to turn their cameras off on different intervals, in order to save battery life. One of these instances was during Muddy Waters’s set, but Waters’s outstanding performance led director Martin Scorsese to spontaneously change his mind and ordered all cameras to be turned on. Because the cameras took several minutes to fully warm up, most caught only the last few bars of Waters’s performance. Laszlo Kovacs, however, either did not hear or disregarded orders to shut down his camera and was the only cameraperson on set who managed to film Waters’s entire performance.

Now when I was a young boy
At the age of five
My mother said I was gonna be
The greatest man alive
But now I’m a man
I’m past twenty-one
I want you to believe me baby
I had lot’s of fun

I’m a man
I spell M
A child
N
That represents “man”
No B
O child
Y
That means “mannish boy”.

The following is from the Wikipedia article below:

Mannish Boy (or “Manish Boy” as it was first labeled) is a blues standard written by Muddy Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley (with Waters and Diddley being credited under their birth names). First recorded in 1955 by Waters, it serves as an “answer song” to Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man“. Waters had recently left the South for Chicago. “Growing up in the South, African-Americans [would] never be referred to as a man – but as ‘boy’. In this context, the song [is] an assertion of black manhood.”

The song reached number five during a stay of six weeks in the Billboard R&B chart. The song was Muddy Waters’ only chart appearance on the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number 51 in 1988. In 1986, Muddy Waters’ original “Mannish Boy” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame “Classics of Blues Recordings” category. It was also included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”. “Mannish Boy” is ranked number 425 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time“.

References:
1. Mannish Boy – Wikipedia

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