Songfacts®:

• "Catfish Blues" is difficult to follow. It starts with Petway wishing he were a catfish because then he'd have "all you pretty women" fishing for him. Catfish are never mentioned again, and Petway instead discusses being broke, hungry, and dirty, pleading for a woman to take him home. He even offers to simply lay around her door if she won't let him all the way in. He then talks about loving a woman who's gone and, in the most perplexing twist of the lyrics, abruptly starts saying he's going to leave a woman and will only go further away the more she cries.
• Petway dropped out of the historical record as quickly as he dropped in. He did two recording sessions with Bluebird Records in Chicago. The first was on March 28, 1941, and the second on February 20, 1942. He recorded a total of 16 songs and left behind a single publicity photo. After that, he disappeared. No one is sure where he was born or where he died, despite some fairly serious efforts to uncover his past.
  
  Despite the brief recording period, Petway's work influenced American and British music. His songs have been covered by blues acts for decades, and he's been cited as an influence on giants such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Jimi Hendrix.
• Petway recorded "Catfish Blues" during his March 28, 1941, sessions. Writing credits are given to him but, as far as anyone can tell, only because he was the first to record it. Folk and blues songs of that era were often traded around, borrowed, and stolen so often that the origin of any given song is impossible to discern.
• Muddy Waters' "Rollin' Stone" borrows the arrangement and some lyrics from this song. A Petway associate said Petway created the song but never wrote it down - he just kept it in his head.
• Canned Heat covered the song on their self-titled debut album, making it one of two "animal blues" songs on the record, the other being "Bullfrog Blues."
• In 1994, MCA/Polydor released a Jimi Hendrix compilation album titled Blues. It has a version of "Catfish Blues" that Hendrix played on November 10, 1967, at Vitus Studios in Bussum, Netherlands.
• John Lee Hooker often played the song live. He included a version on his 1949 album Jack O' Diamonds.