Walter Horton, better known as Big Walter (Horton) or Walter “Shakey” Horton (April 6, 1921 – December 8, 1981) was an American blues harmonica player. A quiet, unassuming, shy man, he is remembered as one of the premier harmonica players in the history of blues. Willie Dixon once called Horton “the best harmonica player I ever heard.”

Robert Palmer named him as “one of the three great harmonica soloists of modern blues”, with the two others being cited as Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson II. Horton was born in Horn Lake, Mississippi. Horton claimed to be born in 1917, His birth date is often cited as April 6, 1918, although some sources give the year as 1917 or 1921. He was playing the harmonica by the time he was five years old. In his early teens, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee. He claimed that his earliest recordings were done there in the late 1920s with the Memphis Jug Band, but there is no documentation of them, and some blues researchers have stated that this story was likely to have been fabricated by Horton.

Like many of his peers, he lived on a meager income during much of his career and endured racial discrimination in the racially segregated United States. In the 1930s he played with numerous blues performers in the Mississippi Delta region. It is generally accepted that he was first recorded in Memphis, backing the guitarist Little Buddy Doyle on Doyle’s recordings for Okeh Records and Vocalion Records in 1939. These recordings were acoustic duets, in a style popularized by Sleepy John Estes and his harmonicist Hammie Nixon, among others. On these recordings, Horton’s style was not yet fully realized, but there are clear hints of what was to come. He eventually stopped playing the harmonica for a living, because of poor health, and worked mainly outside the music industry in the 1940s. By the early 1950s, he was playing music again. He was among the first to be recorded by Sam Phillips, at Sun Records in Memphis, who later recorded Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. For his recordings for Sun, Horton was accompanied by the young pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr., who later was a well-known jazz pianist. Horton’s instrumental track “Easy”, recorded around this time, was based on Ivory Joe Hunter‘s “I Almost Lost My Mind“.

During the early 1950s he appeared on the Chicago blues scene, frequently playing with Memphis and Delta musicians who had also moved north, including the guitarists Eddie Taylor and Johnny Shines. When Junior Wells left the Muddy Waters band at the end of 1952, Horton replaced him long enough to play on one session, in January 1953.

Also known as Mumbles and Shakey (because of his head motion while playing the harmonica), Horton was active in the Chicago blues scene during the 1960s, as blues music gained popularity with white audiences. From the early 1960s onward, he recorded and frequently performed as a sideman with Taylor, Shines, Johnny Young, Sunnyland Slim, Willie Dixon and many others.