I'm Ready

The harmonica player Willie Foster remembered visiting Waters at home before a gig. Waters, shaving, teased him for arriving a day early with a suitcase and said he meant you ready, to which Foster answered that he was ready as anybody can be. Waters snapped his fingers and told Dixon that was a record. Dixon finished the song in about three days. It keeps the swagger and supernatural imagery of (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man and the same stop-time sixteen-bar structure.

Waters recorded it on 1 September 1954 with Little Walter on chromatic harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Otis Spann on piano, Dixon on bass and Fred Below on drums. Chess issued it as a single in late 1954 with I Don't Know Why on the other side. It spent nine weeks on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart and reached number four. It was included on The Best of Muddy Waters in 1958. He re-recorded it for Fathers and Sons in 1969, and again in 1978 as the title track of I'm Ready, produced by Johnny Winter, which won a Grammy.