I got up one Christmas morning and we didn’t have nothing to eat. We didn’t have an apple, we didn’t have an orange, we didn’t have a cake, we didn’t have nothing.

In this recollection, Muddy Waters evokes the stark deprivation of his childhood in the rural Jim Crow South, using the repetition of “we didn’t have” to make absence itself the subject. The specificity of small holiday foods—an apple, an orange, a cake—underscores how poverty is experienced not only as hunger but as exclusion from ordinary rituals of celebration. The line also functions as an origin-story fragment: the blues’ emotional power often comes from transforming such memories of lack into narrative and song. The plain, spoken cadence suggests oral testimony rather than crafted lyric, emphasizing authenticity and the social realities behind the music.