Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a prostitute, esp. later, a second-rate prostitute, one who fails, either through laziness or lack of appeal, to make enough money for her pimp.

1929		Clarence Smith ‘Big Boy, They Can’t Do That’ 🎵 They held me there for ten long days / And my mudkicker didn’t send me no mail.
1936		Archie Seale Man About Harlem 26 Sept. [synd. col.] Gamblers, mudkickers, numbers bankers, etc.
1940		D. Maurer Big Con 210: They are just as superstitious as some mudkickers.
1955		‘Ed Lacy’ Best that Ever Did It (1957) 120: You sit there [...] handing me some dope about a whore and a pimp! What’s with you, sentimental over mudkickers?
1956		‘Ed Lacy’ Men from the Boys (1967) 104: Tell your mudkickers to stop soliciting in the hallways.
1960		S. Harris They Sell Sex [F]or Frenchie and thousands of other call girls, as well as for the vast numbers of their lowlier sisters—the streetwalkers, called ‘mudkickers,’ and ‘pavement beaters,’ the ‘house broads’ and the ‘chippies’ who turn tricks only occasionally—there is no horror: .

2. a prostitute who robs rather than has sex with her clients.

1934		J.L. Kuethe ‘Prison Parlance’ in AS IX:1 27: mud-kicker. A woman who with promise of her body lures a man somewhere and instead of giving herself robs him.
1949		Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).

3. a dedicated, very hard-working prostitute.

1946		Mezzrow & Wolfe Really the Blues 218: Solid ole man, pick up on this rock, and it didn’t come from no mudkicker in the block.
a.1955		‘Pimping Sam’ in D. Wepman et al. Life (1976) 147: She was a stomp-down mud-kicker with kelsey hair.
1968		N. Heard Howard Street 42: She don’t turn down no money, that bitch is a real mud-kicker.
1974		(con. 1945) M. Angelou Gather Together In My Name 162: I’m a damn good one. I’m a mud-kicker. In the streets I make more money by accident than most bitches make on purpose.
1979		‘Iceberg Slim’ Airtight Willie and Me 25: I’d [...] gattle-gun my pimp-dream shit into some mud-kicker’s frosty car.