Songfacts®:

• "Got My Mojo Working" was written by a little-known blues musician named Preston Foster, and was first released by the gospel singer Ann Cole in 1956. Muddy Waters toured with Cole and picked up the song from her, adding some lyrics to his version. Waters popularized the song and it became a blues standard.
• A "mojo" is a kind of magic charm that is a key element of the Hoodoo practice, a form of folk magic developed by African American slaves in the early United States. Other terms include "conjure hand," "lucky hand," "trick bag," "mojo bag," "gris-gris bag," or, as Waters sings on this track, a "mojo hand."
  
  Going down to Louisiana, gonna get me a mojo hand
  Gonna have all you women under my command
  
  Waters is looking for a very specific kind of mojo - one for attraction, since the one he has isn't working on the girl he desires.
  
  The term mojo "hand," specifically, may have developed because some of the common ingredients in mojo bags were and finger bones of animals or humans. Another source for the term may have been Lucky Hand root, a rare orchid root often used in mojo hands. Still another possible source may is the likening of the mixed-up mojo bag ingredients and the cards mixed up in a "hand" of cards.
• Many blues musicians sang about their mojos, but this one is the most prominent (others include "Scarey Day Blues" By Blind Willie McTell and "Mojo Hand" by Lightnin' Hopkins). The concept of the mojo has been distorted and misinterpreted over the years as it became appropriated by a white audience. The "mojo" is often thought of as a concept - a kind of life force or sexual energy - when it is actually a tangible object. A lot of this has to do with Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, who declared himself "Mr. Mojo Risin'" in the song "L.A. Woman."
  
  It's likely that Morrison heard this song and realized that "Mr. Mojo Risin'" is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." He then cast it in terms of his sexual prowess, and many believed he was singing specifically about his penis. The word "mojo" has since been used as the name of a magazine, a mountain bike, a radio format, and as the moniker for many DJs, writers and musicians looking for an edgy appellation.
• Some of the artists who recorded this include Chuck Berry, Canned Heat, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Manfred Mann, Carl Perkins and Jimmy Rogers. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band recorded it on their first album in 1966 as "I Got My Mojo Working." Elvin Bishop, who was a guitarist in the band and later had the solo hit "Fooled Around And Fell In Love," said in a Songfacts interview: "If you were in Chicago in 1960, as I was, every blues band in Chicago played that tune. And here it is in the 2000s, and half the blues bands you go and see now play 'Got My Mojo Working.' If you've ever seen he first Paul Butterfield album, the album cover, the picture was taken in front of a store that sold that kind of stuff. It's magic charms and lucky oil, and different things, different kinds of powder you can sprinkle around the bed. It's voodoo magic stuff."
• Waters enlivened the audience at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival with his set, highlighted by his performance of "Got My Mojo Working." Blues music had a very limited audience that Waters was able to expand with his appearance at the festival, which as the name suggests, typically featured jazz. "Muddy cracked open a door," Buddy Guy wrote in his memoir. "It'd take a while for that door to open completely, but when it did, we started playing places we never dreamed of playing before. What it came down to was white people paying money to hear the blues."
  
  Waters' set was later released as a live album called At Newport 1960.