Big Bill Morganfield listens to a student's question March 3 at Auburn University's Harbert College of Business, where he discussed the music business with several dozen students, professors and blues fans from the Auburn community.

Big Bill Morganfield listens to a student’s question March 3 at Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business, where he discussed the music business with several dozen students, professors and blues fans from the Auburn community.

Big Bill Morganfield isn’t just any bluesman. He’s the son of Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morganfield, and an Auburn University alumnus.* And he’s well aware that as much as the blues is an art form and a yearning, it’s a business.

That business includes using the tools of the Web and Web 2.0  to reach out. I sat in on his rap session with business students, professors from a variety of disciplines, and blues lovers from the Auburn community tonight at Auburn’s Harbert College of Business. His main messages were about loving what you do, protecting your ability to continue making money off doing it, and being genuine in all phases of your work.

[View the story “Big Bill Morganfield shares lessons from his life in the music business” on Storify]

You have to have a good team to work with. That includes the sidemen he picks out, the lawyer who protects his intellectual property rights (he said he’d looked at so many Digital Millennium Copyright Act cease-and-desist forms that he couldn’t even count them anymore), and a publicist.

His communication effort includes a pretty killer website where he controls the narrative about himself, keeps people up to date on what he’s up to, and sells his own music for download or ordering for delivery via snail mail. And he told me after his speaking gig tonight, as he walked out of the building while I finished up some tweets about him, that his publicist had sold him on the power of social media.

Of course, you have to have content that’s worth promoting. Morganfield knows this.

“A lot of people make the mistake of chasing after the dollars,” he said. “When you do that, if they’re blowing away from you and you go after them, you’re only going to get a few. What you want to do is go after the dollars blowing toward you. The way to do that is to get so good, they have to pay you.”

One last note: The last time I bought a blues album was just last summer, but I must admit it could now be classified as an oldie: John Lee Hooker’s “The Healer.” The last one before that was Ali Farkha Toure and Ry Cooder’s collaboration “Talking Timbuktu.” Before that, it was probably R. L. Burnside’s “A Ass Pocket of Whiskey.” But I’m certain the next one will be by Big Bill Morganfield.

*I’m proud to say he got his bachelor’s from Auburn in communication, though I can’t claim to have played a part in that since 1) I wasn’t here then and 2) I don’t think the journalism program and the communication program had yet merged. It’s also very cool that he got a bachelor’s degree in English from the Tuskegee Institute, just down the road a good piece.