A grown man has to spell himself into existence here. The sexual bragging is real—the lover’s man, the Rollin’ Stone, the Hoochie Coochie Man, the impossible boast that he can delay the moon—but the deeper pressure is in the correction: No, B / O / Y. So the joke, the swagger, and the nursery-school spelling all carry their charge in the act of correction itself: I’m a man becomes both come-on and refusal.

The recording makes that claim feel less like an argument than a ritual of possession. Its one-chord stop-time figure hardly goes anywhere harmonically; it gives Waters a hard, repeatable space to occupy, while the shouted responses turn private boast into public confirmation. “Mannish Boy” sounds like Chicago blues turning identity into a groove: funny, obscene, communal, and deadly serious about the name it will not surrender.