Muddy Waters | Mannish Boy (1955)
"Mannish Boy" is a blues standard written by Muddy Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley (with Waters and Diddley being credited under their birth names).
1955-05-24 19:00:00 - Music Video
First recorded in 1955 by Waters, it serves as an "answer song" to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man",[1] which was in turn inspired by Waters' and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man".
"Mannish Boy" features a repeating stop-time figure on one chord throughout the song.
Although the song contains sexual boasting, its repetition of "I'm a man, I spell M, A child, N" was understood as political. 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."