Muddy Waters

Water and air take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in fire and earth, and four of the ten cardinal and four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Waters took Mississippi Delta blues to Chicago and plugged it in, which is where rock and roll came from, and that the Rolling Stones took their name from one of his songs.

The Moon sits in mild friction with Uranus at four tenths of a degree, and the reading is security and freedom fighting each other: an unsettled early home, difficulty staying anywhere, and a habit of leaving before being left. A record whose central fact is a move of six hundred miles out of the Delta, made by a man who then changed the instrument rather than the songs, is that contact with a biography attached. The Moon's sign is certain at twenty two degrees of Pisces, where the mood of a room gets absorbed whether or not it is wanted.

Mercury sits sixty degrees from Saturn at three tenths of a degree, the closest contact in the chart, which is structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration. In a musician the record credits with carrying one form into a city and rebuilding it with electricity, patience and long concentration are a better account of the working life than anything quicker would be. Both planets sit on the first degree of a sign, Mercury on the first of Aries and retrograde, Saturn on the first of Gemini, so the tightest pairing in the chart is made by two planets at the very start of something.

Venus sits in mild friction with Pluto at under two thirds of a degree, love and control: jealousy, power struggles inside closeness, and attraction to exactly the person who will require the most change. The Moon sits in easy contact with Neptune at under nine tenths of a degree and Venus a fifth of a turn from the same planet at a degree and a quarter, which is a real gift for beauty, colour and music arriving twice over. Mercury and Venus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Westmont on 30 April 1983, at seventy. Pluto stood in easy contact with its own natal place at under three tenths of a degree, a contact shared with everybody born within a few years of him, and nothing else sat inside half a degree. The Moon was full and eighty eight per cent lit.