This was recorded with one of the most acclaimed blues groups in history: Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (also known as Elgin Evans) on drums, and Otis Spann on piano. The band recorded a series of blues classics during the early 1950s, some with the help of the bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon.
"I'm a Man" was released as the B-side of "Bo Diddley", his first single in April 1955. The single became a two-sided hit and reached number one in the Billboard R&B chart. It was inspired by Muddy Waters' 1954 song , written by Willie Dixon.
The song makes reference to hoodoo folk magic elements and makes novel use of a stop-time musical arrangement. This musical device is commonly heard in New Orleans jazz, when the instrumentation briefly stops, allowing for a short instrumental or vocal solo before resuming. It became one of Waters' most popular and identifiable songs and helped secure Dixon's role as Chess Records' chief songwriter. The stop-time riff was "soon absorbed into the lingua franca of blues, R&B, jazz, and rock and roll", according to musicologist Robert Palmer, and is used in several popular songs. When Bo Diddley adapted it for "I'm a Man", it became one of the most recognizable musical phrases in blues.
Bo Diddley modified the song's signature riff for his March 1955 song "I'm a Man". He reworked it as a four-note figure, which is repeated for the entire song without a progression to other chords. Music critic and writer Cub Koda calls it "the most recognizable blues lick in the world".
Muddy Waters, not to be outdone, responded two months later with an answer song to "I'm a Man", titled . Waters recalled:
Bo Diddley, he was tracking me down with my beat when he made 'I'm a Man'. That's from 'Hoochie Coochie Man.' Then I got on it with 'Mannish Boy' and just drove him out of my way
Emphasizing the origin of Bo Diddley's song, Waters sticks to the original first eight-bar phrase from "Hoochie Coochie Man" and includes some of the hoodoo references.
Many British bands have covered this song, including The Who, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and The Yarbirds, Jimmy Page and The Yarbirds, among many others.
Two of the more well known versions in the US were by and Chicago. This was the final Spencer Davis Group release to feature Steve Winwood, who left to form Traffic.
features an extended percussion and drum section with a total run time of 7 minutes and 40 seconds, and is based around the distortion-heavy blues-rock guitar of Terry Kath, the drumming of Danny Seraphine, the bass of Peter Cetera, the soaring Hammond organ of Robert Lamm and the horn players periodically switching over to auxiliary percussion instruments, such as claves, cowbell, maracas, and tambourine. Kath, Cetera and Lamm each sing a verse apiece (not singing the lyrics as they were originally written, but as they misheard and/or revised them).
Bo Diddley's original "I'm a Man" is ranked number 369 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2012 the song, along with the self-named A-side song "Bo Diddley", was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important" American sound recordings. In 2018, "I'm a Man" was inducted into the Blues Foundation Blues Hall of Fame as a "classic of blues recording".
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