The remains of the cabin on Stovall Plantation where he lived in his youth are now at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. "Waters" was added years later, as he began to play harmonica and perform locally in his early teens. Grant gave him the nickname "Muddy" at an early age because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek. His grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth. His gravestone gives his birth year as 1915. The Social Security Death Index, relying on the Social Security card application submitted after his move to Chicago in the mid-1940s, lists him as being born April 4, 1913.
The 1920 census lists him as five years old as of March 6, 1920, suggesting that his birth year may have been 1914. A 1955 interview in the Chicago Defender is the earliest in which he stated 1915 as the year of his birth, and he continued to say this in interviews from that point onward. In the 1930s and 1940s, before his rise to fame, the year of his birth was reported as 1913 on his marriage license, recording notes, and musicians' union card. He stated that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915, but other evidence suggests that he was born in Jug's Corner, in neighboring Issaquena County, in 1913. Muddy Waters's place and date of birth are not conclusively known.
In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time professional musician. He was recorded in Mississippi by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941. Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age 17 was playing the guitar and the harmonica, emulating the local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson. McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post- war blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues." His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude."