What This Classic Rock Icon Had to Say About His Song Getting Rejected by Blues Pioneer, Muddy Waters

George Thorogood’s 1982 hit single, “Bad To The Bone”, is so quintessentially bluesy that it sounds like it came straight from the Mississippi Delta, circa 1942. So, it only makes sense that when Thorogood finished the song and started shopping it around, he began with a man who personifies this Delta blues sound: Muddy Waters.

However, Thorogood didn’t get the reaction he was expecting. Speaking to The Guardian in 2026, he recalled, “[Muddy Waters’] manager got very irritated, saying Muddy would never record a blues song by a white guy. I said, ‘That’s a bunch of horse manure.’”

“If Eric Clapton or Keith Richards had written it,” Thorogood continued, “they’d have recorded it in a minute. But me being a nobody from Delaware, they turned us down.”

Muddy Waters Didn’t Want George Thorogood’s Track, but Someone Else Did

To Muddy Waters’ credit (and, we suppose, George Thorogood’s), the fact that Thorogood was a “nobody from Delaware” likely didn’t play into Waters’ decision not to cover “Bad To The Bone”. The blues pioneer didn’t cover Eric Clapton or Keith Richards during his career. And that’s likely because it was his music that Clapton and Richards were trying to emulate. There is no chicken or the egg in this equation. Without Muddy, there’d be no Rolling Stones. Quite literally—the band got their name from a Muddy Waters track called “Rollin’ Stone”.

And while it likely stung to hear Waters’ manager reject the song so quickly, Thorogood would soon find other markets for “Bad To The Bone”. In that same interview with The Guardian, Thorogood recalled getting a phone call from Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he described as “not somebody to be trifled with.”

“We got a phone call from him, saying in his Terminator voice, ‘Your song. Give it to me. Now.’ It was perfect for the biker and bar fight scenes [of Terminator 2] because it was rough. There was a bit of violence. But it was tongue-in-cheek.”

He continued, “That’s the whole idea of the song. None of us in the band are tough guys. ‘Bad To The Bone’ brings out the lion in the mouse. But it’s not to be taken that seriously. It’s an over-masculine chuckle. These days, I’ll be pushing a baby buggy and some people will go, ‘Oh, you’re supposed to be some kind of bad guy, huh?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, y’know, even wolves have babies. It doesn’t make ‘em any less bad.”

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