Electric Mud, a 1968 album by Muddy Waters, is considered variously as a groundbreaking experiment, a travesty against the blues, and/or a commercial sell-out.

Riding the wave of the folk-rock boom of the 1960s as well as a revived interest in the original form spurred by the success of blues-based rockers such as The Rolling Stones, Waters had found a mainstream white audience after more than two decades of jukebox race music hits on Chess Records and playing the Chicago blues club circuit. In an attempt to capitalize on this new popularity, producer Marshall Chess (son of label founder and owner Leonard Chess) convinced Waters to move away from the traditional acoustic and blues styles he had become famous for and "modernize" his sound. Chess brought in a host of studio musicians and worked up Jimi Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock arrangements of several Waters classics, some new material, and a cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together ".

The resulting disc, titled Electric Mud and featuring a back-cover photo of a dressed-down Waters holding a customized guitar of the sort favored by psychedelic rockers, was an immediate and severe critical debacle. Blues purists decried the move, rock critics derided the playing as derivative and pretentious, and psychedelic devotees simply had more pressing pressings to attend to. Even Waters himself would eventually dismiss the album as "not real blues" (Waters also revealed that he played little, if any, guitar on the album). The album was a commercial success by blues standards, however, selling over 100,000 copies and reaching the lower tiers of the Billboard top 200 albums chart; adventurous progressive FM stations picked up the album.

By the end of the '70s, the album was out of print and by the time of his death in 1983 was considered little more than a curious footnote to Waters' career, though its proponents, particularly Marshall Chess, never stopped claiming that it was a brilliant, misunderstood experiment. The album took on a second life in the 1990s, as hip-hop artists, notably Chuck D of Public Enemy, discovered the album as a source of fresh samples and funky arrangements. The album was released on a deluxe CD edition in 1996; in 2003 many of the original players reunited with Chuck D to record a rap tribute to Electric Mud (these sessions were filmed as part of the PBS television series "The Blues "). In June 2003 the reunited band, fronted by Chuck D, headlined the Chicago Blues Festival playing new versions of several tracks from the Electric Mud sessions.