(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man

Dixon brought the song to Leonard Chess in late 1953, and Chess answered that if Muddy liked it, Dixon should give it to Waters. Waters was playing the Club Zanzibar, and Dixon showed it to him during an intermission. By Dixon's account Waters learned enough to perform it that night. The band recorded it on 7 January 1954: Waters on vocal and electric guitar, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans and Otis Spann, with Dixon playing double bass on a Waters session for the first time. They cut two takes, and the alternate differs from the master by only six seconds. It is a sixteen-bar blues built on a stop-time riff, and the lyrics, about hoodoo charms and a fortune told before the narrator was born, boast of sexual and supernatural power. Dixon said the words voiced an audience's wish to brag, and Waters later said they were meant to be funny.

Chess released it in early 1954 with She's So Pretty on the other side. It entered the Billboard rhythm and blues charts on 13 March, reached number three on the Juke Box chart and number eight on the Best Seller chart, and spent 13 weeks on the lists. It was the biggest hit of his career. Chess retitled it Hoochie Coochie on The Best of Muddy Waters in 1958. Waters remade it on Electric Mud in 1968 and, with Jimmy Rogers, on I'm Ready in 1978, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry in 2004.

Bo Diddley and Mannish Boy

Bo Diddley reworked its riff as a four-note figure for I'm a Man in March 1955, and Waters answered two months later with Mannish Boy. He recalled that Diddley was tracking him down with his own beat. Cub Koda called Diddley's riff the most recognizable blues lick in the world. The Allman Brothers Band, Humble Pie, Steppenwolf and Supertramp are among those who recorded the song.

Live

A rendition by his Newport band is the second track on At Newport 1960, recorded at the festival on 3 July 1960.