Muddy Waters / Hard Again / 1977
Crosseyed Cat
wry, brooding, half-comic paranoia
A slow, grinding blues in which Muddy Waters uses a strange, oversized cat as a comic stand-in for suspicion and sexual jealousy. The narrator claims he's leaving his woman alone while circling obsessively around what the animal in her house seems to represent about who else might be there.
jealousy and suspicion infidelity domestic surveillance comic euphemism masculine pride and failure
Who's speaking
A first-person male narrator addressing the listener rather than the woman directly, recounting his visits to her house; he presents himself as wronged and well-meaning, but his account is filtered through obvious jealousy, making him an unreliable, self-justifying witness.
What happens
The song opens with a resigned announcement of withdrawal, then immediately undercuts it by dwelling on the cat guarding the woman's home. Each verse escalates the cat's strangeness — its size, its restless movement, its unblinking stare — until the narrator's outward resignation collapses into open frustration that nothing he does satisfies her.
How it's built
Built on the traditional twelve-bar blues pattern with AAB verses, the repeated first lines functioning almost as a stalling tactic before the twist in the third line lands. There's no bridge or key change; instead the song advances through accumulation, each verse adding a new detail about the cat that deepens the insinuation, culminating in a final verse that drops the animal metaphor and states the emotional grievance plainly.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The cat functions throughout as a coded figure for a rival male presence in the woman's home, its behavior (growling, pacing, staring) mapped onto emotions of hostility and watchfulness that the narrator can't otherwise name.
- irony
- The narrator's opening claim that he must leave the woman alone is immediately contradicted by his continued visits and obsessive attention, exposing the gap between his stated resolve and his actual behavior.
- hyperbole
- Describing the cat as too large for a house cat but too small for a lion inflates a domestic irritant into something almost mythic, heightening the comic menace of the metaphor.
- anaphora
- The repeated call-and-response structure of paired opening lines in each verse creates a churning, circular feel that mirrors the narrator's inability to move past his suspicion.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues".
1913 - 1983 / United States
Full biography and catalogue