How Mud Morganfield earnt his blues stripes - Rye International Jazz and Blues Festival

Also on the line-up are Curtis Stigers, Stanley Jordan, Roachford, Imelda May and Cuban musician Roberto Fonseca.

Mud will take the stage on August 28 from 3-5pm at St Mary's Church, Rye.

“I just love the people. A British audience is just so humble and so grateful and I always get a really warm welcome. You can sound (rubbish) and people will still applaud. I just wish that I could pack you all up and take you over to the United States!

“Everything in the States is so messed up, people getting shot, people getting stabbed. It's great to feel welcomed and appreciated. You see so little of that in the world. I have been coming to the UK for the past 17 or 18 years and it is a fantastic place.”

And thank goodness we've got through the pandemic: “It was rough. It was rough for everybody. Everybody had to work from home but now we're just starting to open up and I've had all four vaccinations and I will have a fifth and a sixth, and it is great. I lost four really great friends of mine during the pandemic. One guy we lost was my best friend in the whole world. We came up through the grammar schools and the high schools together and he was built like Samson. He would work out three or four times a week but the virus just wiped him out in 30 days. It was like germ warfare that we were fighting, and you can’t fight something that just can't see.”

Which makes it all the more enjoyable to get back to performance “especially in the UK where people are so warm and welcoming.”

Mud doesn't necessarily feel changed by the pandemic – simply older: “I'm ageing! We all are and you have to remember that nobody gets out of this alive but my mother will be 90 on August 14. And she is getting on pretty well. She gets around well and she's got a little cane that she carries and she feeds herself and looks after herself.”

Mud’s father, Muddy Waters (1913-1983), was inevitably a much more absent figure. Mud was effectively brought up by his mum and by a large cast of uncles: “I didn't see a great deal of my dad. He was like every other blues guy. They moved around. I got to know him but it was not as well as I would have liked. When I became more of an adult we would have dinner together, but when he came home and he would be needing to sleep because he had been touring for months.

“I was a late bloomer (as a bluesman). People were asking me ‘Where have you been?’ And my dad had passed. But you don't just go to school and say I am a blues man now. Blues is different. You've got to go through something, something like alcoholism or cancer, something really big. You've got to have lived something to get the blues. You can't get the blues if you haven't had any pain.”

So what was Mud’s rite of passage?

“I earnt my stripes as an African American on the streets of Chicago. I saw what it was like. I saw it was happening. People getting shot. People getting stabbed. I lived through that and that's how I earnt my stripes.”