Mannish Boy

Waters, Mel London and Bo Diddley share the credit, with Waters and Diddley listed under their birth names. Waters recorded it in Chicago on 24 May 1955 as an answer song to Diddley's I'm a Man, which had itself been inspired by (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man. It repeats a stop-time figure on a single chord. Little Walter was on tour with his hit My Babe and unavailable, so the harmonica was played by Junior Wells, with Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Fred Below on drums and an unidentified female chorus. It is the only Waters recording between January 1953 and June 1957 without Little Walter. It reached number five on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart, where it stayed for six weeks.

The line about spelling out the word man was understood as political. Waters had recently left the South for Chicago, where Black Americans were never called a man but a boy, and the song is read as an assertion of Black manhood.

He recorded it again for Electric Mud in 1968 and for Hard Again in 1977, where it opens the album. Dan Oppenheimer of Rolling Stone said that version sounded as if it had been recorded live. A live version with Johnny Winter is on Muddy 'Mississippi' Waters Live (1979), and he played it at The Last Waltz. The 1955 original entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986. In 1988 it was used in a Levi's 501 advertisement and reissued in Europe, reaching number 51, his only appearance on the UK Singles Chart.