Acclaim for
The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
“Can’t Be Satisfied is as colorful as the tones of Muddy Waters’s voice and as much an essay in the foibles and triumphs of human nature as are the lyrics to Muddy’s best songs . . . It’s full of crisp, brightly written tales of knifings and shootings, swindles, adultery, and illegitimate births, drugs, and alcoholism, and then there’s the music—the steaming cauldron of Delta acoustic blues and urban rhythms and amplification from which rock and roll emerged.”
—Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix
“This is way better than the typical blues book. Can’t Be Satisfied does justice to an American legend.”
—Leopold Froehlich, Playboy
“Through deep historical, cultural, and social research, Robert Gordon spins the story not just of America’s original bluesman but of the birth and evolution of this uniquely American music.”
—Nelson Taylor, Providence Journal
“A rich, knowing book . . . a full and oft-disturbing portrait of an artist at once sexually driven and emotionally remote . . . Gordon’s a solid historian and a crackling, jivey stylist; he feels the earthy swing of Muddy’s music and the funk of the juke houses and clubs that spawned it.”
—Chris Morris, LA Weekly
“Men don’t come more masculine than Muddy Waters . . . Gordon, whose crisp writing, acute insights, and obvious passion for the music fuel his work, has written a book as large as that man.”
—Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle
“Indispensable.”
—David Gates, Bookforum
“Thoroughly entertaining . . . brimming with anecdotes from Waters’s family, friends, coworkers, and band mates.”
—Buddy Blue, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Gordon places Waters in musical and social history without becoming pedantic and, equally important, places the man in a world we can see and feel.”
—Michael Lydon, New York Times Book Review
“A compelling, complete, and entertaining discourse on the man Keith Richards called the ‘codebook’ between blues, rock and roll, and the other forms of music . . . It’s the lesser-known details of Waters’s life that fascinate and make Gordon’s book so vital.”
—Regis Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Gordon interviewed seemingly everyone alive who knew Waters, and to judge from his bibliography he has read everything, too. And, most important, he loves the music and offers insightful observations of the records.”
—Frank Reiss, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Compellingly written . . . A well-documented, anecdote-filled biography . . . The book’s extensive footnotes offer a treasure trove of interesting facts and fascinating stories about the American blues scene.”
—Martin Brady, Bookpage
“Gordon tells it straight . . . He reveals the boozing, gambling, and womanizing of dangerous bluesmen on the road packing pistols, profanity, and half-pints — and occasionally making music for the ages.”
—Marty Racine, Houston Chronicle
“Richly detailed . . . Can’t Be Satisfied is likely to be the definitive treatment of perhaps the genre’s definitive artist, a work of musical biography and history that should have the same durability and relevance that Guralnick’s treatments of Elvis Presley (Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love) have had.”
—Chris Herrington, Memphis Flyer
“Can’t Be Satisfied reads more like a novel than a biography . . . If you want the truth about Muddy Waters, about the development of the blues in the United States, about race relations, about large parts of the record business, about the road, and about the myriad of things that figure into a not-so-simple life, then you’ll need Can’t Be Satisfied — and a stack of Muddy Waters albums.”
—Jim Beal Jr., San Antonio Express-News
“Gordon strips away many myths about Muddy Waters . . . The great success of this biography comes from how the writer so skillfully captures the place and feel of Waters’s world . . . Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be given to any biography is that on its pages, you feel like you meet the subject. I saw a handful of Muddy Waters’s shows. I leave Can’t Be Satisfied feeling like I can smell, touch, and, most important, hear Muddy Waters again.”
—Charles Cross, Seattle Times
OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT GORDON
It Came from Memphis
The King on the Road
This is the earliest known photograph of Muddy Waters, probably taken in Memphis in 1942. He is holding his Fisk–Library of Congress 78 rpm record. Courtesy of the Estate of McKinley Morganfield
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EHI ITE
www.canongate.tv
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Gordon
Foreword copyright © 2002 by Keith Richards
Introduction to the Canongate edition copyright © 2013 by Robert Gordon
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Originally published in hardcover in 2002 by Little, Brown and Company,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: “I Be’s Troubled,” aka “I Can’t Be Satisfied” copyright © 1959, 1987; “Country Blues,” aka “Feel Like Going Home” copyright © 1964, 1992; “Train Fare Home,” aka “Train Fare Blues” copyright © 1967, 1995; “Rollin’ & Tumblin’ ”copyright © 1960, 1988; “Rollin’ Stone,” aka “Catfish Blues” copyright © 1959, 1987. All written by McKinley Morganfield, pka Muddy Waters. WATERTOONS MUSIC (BMI) / Administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Mannish Boy” written by McKinley Morganfield, pka MuddyWaters, E. McDaniel, and Melvin London. Copyright © 1955, 1983 WATERTOONS MUSIC (BMI) / Administered by BUG / ARC MUSIC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Hoochie Coochie Man” written by Willie Dixon. Copyright © 1957, 1964 (renewed) HOOCHIE COOCHIE MUSIC (BMI) / Administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Mannish Boy” (Elias McDaniel, Mel London, McKinley Morganfield) copyright © 1955 (renewed) by Arc Music Corporation, Lonmel Publishing, and Watertoons Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission. International copyright secured. “Cotton Crop Blues” (James Cotton) copyright © 1954 (renewed) 1982 by Hi-Lo Music, BMI. All rights reserved. Used by permission. International copyright secured.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 869 5
eISBN 978 0 85786 870 1
Book design by Fearn Cutler de Vicq
For my children
Lila Miriam and Esther Rose
For my parents
Alvin and Elaine
For my old friend
Peter Guralnick
For my new friend
Amelia Cooper
They said it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men . . .
— Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction to the Canongate Edition
Introduction
1 Mannish Boy / 1913–1925
2 Man, I Can Sing / 1926–1940
3 August 31, 1941 / 1941
4 Country Blues / 1941–1943
5 City Blues / 1943–1946
6 Rollin’ and Tumblin’ / 1947–1950
7
All-Stars / 1951–1952
8 Hoochie Coochie Man / 1953–1955
9 The Blues Had a Baby / 1955–1958
10 Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano / 1958–1959
11 My Dog Can Bark / 1960–1967
12 Rollin’ Stone / 1967–1969
13 Eyes on the Prize / 1970–1975
14 Hard Again / 1976–1983
15 This Dirt Has Meaning / 1983 and After
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Itinerary of the 1941 and 1942 Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study
Appendix B: Muddy’s Delta Record Collection and Repertoire
Appendix C: How to Buy Muddy Waters and Other Related Recordings
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD
BY KEITH RICHARDS
There’s a demon in me. I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff. When you listen to Muddy Waters, you can hear all of the angst and all of the power and all of the hardship that made that man. But Muddy let it out through music, set the feelings loose in the air. The blues makes me feel better.
I heard Muddy through Mick Jagger. We were childhood friends, hadn’t seen each other for a few years, and I met him on a train around 1961. He had a Chuck Berry record and The Best of Muddy Waters. I was going to mug the guy for the Chuck Berry because I wasn’t familiar with Muddy. We started talking, went ’round to his house, and he played me Muddy and I said, “Wow. Again.” And about ten hours later, I was still going, “Okay, again.” When I got to Muddy and heard “Still a Fool” and “Hoochie Coochie Man” — that is the most powerful music I’ve ever heard. The most expressive.
He named us in a way, and we basically wanted to turn the world on to Muddy and his like. This little band of ours had finally found a gig, and we put our last few pennies in for this ad in a magazine. We called to tell them where we were playing at and they said, “Well what’s your name?” And on the floor was The Best of Muddy Waters and on the first side was “Rollin’ Stone.” So we named ourselves the Rolling Stones. I always felt that Muddy ran the band, that there was a real connection.
What Muddy was doing at Chess in the late forties and in the fifties was transforming the blues to meet the needs of the society. It had been acoustic blues before World War II; after that, they started shouting it out in Chicago. The whole city was louder, and the music became city blues. They were inventing it as they went along because nobody knew anything about the electric guitar or how to record it. It was just beautiful experimentation.
Muddy was like a map, he was really the key to all of the other stuff. I found out Muddy and Chuck were working out of the same studio and on the same Chess label, and there was the Willie Dixon connection too. Then I had to find everything of Muddy’s that I could and at the same time find where Muddy got it from. So I sat and listened to Robert Lockwood Jr. and to cousins and relations. Via Muddy, I found Robert Johnson, and then it all started to make sense.
Twentieth-century music is based on the blues. You wouldn’t have jazz or any other modern music without the blues. And therefore every pop song, no matter how trite or crass, has got a bit of the blues somewhere in it — even without them knowing, even though they’ve washed most of it out. This music got called the blues about a hundred years ago, but the music is about a feeling and feelings didn’t just start a hundred years ago. Feelings start in the person and I think that’s why the blues is universal, because it’s part of everybody. Muddy is like a very comforting arm around the shoulder. You need that, you know? It can be dark down there, man.
INTRODUCTION TO THE CANONGATE EDITION
It’s been one hundred years since McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield came screaming and crying onto this Mississippi earth, poor and common as dirt, a future as dim and forlorn as one could imagine in a post-slavery “democracy”. Yet he made himself into an icon, a recording artist and performer whose work has transcended generations, whose art has translated across lands, and remains, decades after his death, powerful and exciting.
Blues music as we know it had yet to coalesce in 1913. The keening sounds of the slide guitar were beginning to proliferate, and the rhythms and elements that would become the blues were blowing across the delta like a storm, gathering strength and shape. Muddy’s maturity coincides with the codification of the blues, and what he took from Robert Johnson and Son House to make his own, stands today as a bedrock of modern music.
Even that foundation, however, has begun to shift. Through the second half of the twentieth century, all music seemed a response to what Muddy (and Sam Phillips in Memphis, and a few others throughout the region) created; if it wasn’t an imitation or variation, it was something like “industrial” music—a purposeful reaction to the roots. Now, in a world caught on the internet, international influences have expanded and machines—software versions of what once were called “synthesizers” and now can be played with the same lettered keys with which this introduction is being typed—make it easier to forge new sounds with new patterns. Blues remains a vital root, but the tree has grown, the expanse of branches shading new areas.
What world, what life and opportunities, would Muddy face if born in today’s Mississippi Delta? The poverty that once dominated the delta remains a prominent factor in daily life, though diluted by occasional industries—catfish farming, automobile manufacturing, Viking Ranges. Casino gambling has spread through the delta, giving employment to some, robbing most of both their meager wages and their hopes, fueling unemployment and thus also the youth gangs that maraud ever more freely. The odds for a life better than the minimal sustenance of sharecropping are probably better than they were, though that’s balanced by the depths of the new horrors: gangs, guns, methamphetamine and the disintegration of the village.
Muddy had an entrepreneurial drive and a desire to make his mark, but the gumption for hard won goals is so easily numbed nowadays in a culture that kills intentions and distinction with kindness and ease, that dilutes what’s original with the prefabricated, that paves with plastic the untrodden paths almost immediately upon their discovery.
A new industry is growing in the delta, and all across Mississippi, and it sheds a light of hope: Cultural tourism. The state that fought recognition of its dark-skinned citizens as even being human has come to embrace their culture. What once was despised is now embraced: The state sponsors the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of historical markers placed in urban and rural areas, in historical locations and on vacant lots, amid the urban bustle and away off in the middle of nowhere, all commemorating contributions to the blues, all heralding this fundamentally African-American expression. As well, there’s the B. B. King Museum, with hundreds of schoolchildren bussed in daily to see consecrated and praised the life of a poor dirt farmer, the pride as plain as the once-institutional efforts to keep him down; the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland, music festivals, home tours and shrines of all kinds, large and small. Some are privately funded, others bankrolled by taxpayers. The memorials and honors extend past music to the political heroes who were gunned down, to the Freedom Riders, to anonymous street protestors and to members of international communities who helped shape the delta—Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, Italian, Mexican, Native American. The past in Mississippi is being confronted, and it’s not being whitewashed.
The Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Muddy Waters song, recently charged over $800 for a single evening’s ticket (that’s official prices, not scalpers)—a sum Muddy would have loved to have earned for a whole year’s backbreaking labor working dawn to dusk in the cotton fields. B. B. King doesn’t charge as much as the Stones, but his success indicates the continuation of the recognition and honor Muddy received in his lifetime.
Bluesmen and blues women, blues songs
and blues fans—they continue to be born every day. Their provenance is no longer restricted to a geographical area nor the result of immediate environment. And the reason for this enduring life of the blues is the same as it ever was: honesty. Blues tells fundamental truths, sings of hard times and hope, relieves burdens and celebrates a brighter tomorrow (actually, a brighter tonight). The blues, in an uneven, lovely exchange, is nourished by the chaos and unhappiness in life, and in turn provides us with a poetry and the courage to continue.
A bit of shopkeeping: the 1940 census, released since this book’s initial publication, further affirms Muddy’s birth year as 1913. The census is certainly not infallible, but it is interesting to see the early information revealed.
Also new since original publication are a related book and documentary. I was taken by the John Work and Alan Lomax research trips, and with Bruce Nemerov I published my findings in a Vander-bilt University Press book, Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941–1942. This book includes the previously unpublished original research papers by the three African-American scholars so often overlooked: John Work, Lewis Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. As well, I made a documentary, Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied, which features great on-screen interviews and some astounding Muddy Waters performances. I hope both of these, along with the reissuing of this biography, will introduce Muddy and the blues to new fans and will also enrich the understanding of those who’ve been lost in this groove before. It’s a tough world, and the blues helps us through it.
– Robert Gordon, Memphis, Tennessee
January, 2013
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