Of the seven million African Americans that left the South during the Great Migration, it is estimated that more than 500,000 Black southerners migrated to Chicago between 1916 and 1971. Throughout American’s twentieth century wartime years Black southerners were attracted to northern cities by work and housing prospects, along with an abstract promise of enhanced cultural and social freedom. Rail lines and bus transportation offered the means necessary to escape the harsh conditions of the South’s prevailing sharecropper system, bringing thousands of Black migrants to cities such as Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. These migrations established a Black industrial working class, and in doing so, created the circumstances for a novel urban subculture—one grounded in collective experience and southern cultural practices. Muddy Waters is a prime example of a Great Migration-era sound, combining southern performance practices with urban technologies and instrumentation to craft the electric blues.