Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  INTRODUCTION

  Muddy Waters was barefoot when he got word a white man was looking for him. It was Sunday, the last day of August, 1941. The cotton had bloomed and was set, the crop as it would be until picked in about a month. Muddy, like the other blacks who farmed a piece of someone else’s land in Mississippi, was enjoying his lay-by. Soon, he’d be working that cotton from sun to sun.

  Word reached Muddy before the white man did. “Uh-oh! This is it,” Muddy remembered thinking. “They done found out I’m sellin’ whiskey.”

  He went to neutral ground, the plantation commissary, away from his home where his hooch was hid. The white man found him there. “I went there, I said, ‘Yassuh?’ He said, ‘Hey, hey, don’t yassuh me. Say no and yes to me.’ He said, ‘I been looking for you.’ I said, ‘For what?’ ‘I want you to play something for me. Where’s your guitar at?’ I say, ‘It’s down in my house.’ ‘Come on, get it. I want you to play for me.’ ”

  The white man’s name was Alan Lomax. He was twenty-six years old. Muddy was twenty-eight. “I couldn’t figure it out when he first got there,” Muddy said. “I didn’t know whether he was one of them smart police coming after me, or what the heck was goin’ on. I couldn’t handle this white man going to put me in his car and drive me around, going into my house. I say, ‘Uh-huh, revenue man trying to get into me.’ ” But it was hard to peg this Lomax character. His accent was strange — Texas, but watered down by Washington. And he had a strange manner. He asked Muddy for some water and then astonished the Mississippian by sharing. “Same cup I drink out of, he drinks out of that too. I said, ‘Not a white man doing this!’ No no, this was too much, he going too far. But my mind still thinking, ‘Oh, he’d do anything to see can he bust you.’ ”

  Hovering in the background, accompanying Lomax but kept at arm’s length, was the man who initiated the historic expedition, John Work III, a black man. Work mostly stayed quiet. In the deep South, he would be perceived as nothing more than Lomax’s flunky. And Lomax did little to counter such a perception. Work’s presence intensified Muddy’s suspicions, as did the absence of Captain Holt, the Stovall Plantation overseer. Plantations did not take kindly to “agitators” of any sort coming on their land, and anyone not a resident and not known was an agitator until his presence was explained. The same grapevine that warned Muddy he was wanted would have first reached Captain Holt. Muddy was well liked on Stovall, both by the tenant farmers and by the Stovall family. Whenever revenue agents had previously come around, Colonel Stovall himself had come to warn Muddy. If he were carted off, the hands would be losing not only one of their bootleggers, but also their most popular musician. But Holt’s absence meant this revenuer’s visit was approved, and Muddy realized the farm was sacrificing him to the government, a pawn between two kings.

  He was a peculiar revenue agent, this white man. Instead of extracting a badge, Lomax went to his car, pulled out a Martin guitar, and began to pick some blues. Muddy could now see what he’d only glimpsed before: the entire backseat and most of the trunk were occupied by a recording machine, a disc cutter, and a generator that converted the automobile’s DC current to AC. The recording device also had a playback arm, allowing Lomax to share what he’d been given before taking it away.

  “He brought his machine,” said Muddy, “[and] he got his old guitar and he started playing, and he said, ‘. . . I heard Robert Johnson’s dead and I heard you’s just as good and I want you to do something for me. Will you let me record some of your songs, and I’ll play them back and let you listen to them? I want to take it to the Library of Congress.’ I didn’t know what did he mean by the Library of Congress.”

  But enough was adding up: this stranger’s interest was music and not whiskey stills. Word about the turn of events quickly reached Son Sims, Muddy’s musical partner, and instead of keeping far from there, he now hurried to Muddy’s house, guitar in hand. “We got his stuff out of the trunk of his car,” said Muddy, “and all his long batteries and set ’em up on my front porch, and I was in my front room with my guitar, my little microphone, and he ground his wire down through the window and he went to work.”

  The discs were thick slabs of glass (metals were conserved for military use during World War II) sprayed with a black acetate coating, into which a lathe cut grooves that captured the sound transmitted through the microphones. These discs were sixteen inches across; the standard LP is twelve inches and a 78 is ten inches, so these were unlike anything Muddy had seen on a jukebox or in a store. Their imposing size underscored the importance of the event.

  The fellowship was christened, and the distrust dismissed, with a toast. The whiskey warm in everyone’s belly, Muddy’s first recording session began. “So I just went along and made that ‘Country Blues,’ ” said Muddy. “When he played back the first song, I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. I thought, ‘Man, I can sing.’ Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ ”

  More than half a century has passed since that encounter, and geography is losing its importance. Cultures are increasingly the same everywhere. Where once the Mississippi Delta was a unique place — poverty made it a quarantined culture long after television and other mass media had penetrated similar outposts — now a person can live anywhere and grow up with the blues.

  Muddy’s boyhood home, where Lomax recorded him, still stands — though not in the same place. It used to be on the county road that runs along the edge of Stovall Farms (as the former plantation is today known); I was raised in Memphis, the capital of the Mississippi Delta, and I remember more than once detouring to drive by Muddy’s cabin. In the 1980s, a tornado blew off its roof, and the Stovalls, for safety reasons, removed the rooms that had been added over the years, leaving just the single-room cypress-planked structure that had been built by trappers around the time of the Civil War. Tourists began to remove splinters and hunks of those planks as mementos. Between the treasure hunters, the insects, and the natural elements, the cabin began to disintegrate. In the late 1990s, the House of Blues, a chain of nightclubs, leased the structure from the Stovalls, dismantled it, transported it, cleaned and treated the wood, created a museum display within it, and sent it on a tour; it became itinerant, like the blues musician it sheltered, though collecting more money than he did. In the course of his life, Muddy became emblematic for so much — not just the blues generally, but also the twentieth-century migration from a southern rural culture to a northern urban one, the evolution from acoustic music to electric music, and the acceptance of African American culture into American society. And now his cabin assumed its own meaning: the commodification of the blues.

  The blues, a music and culture once denigrated and dismissed by white society, has become big business. Some of the world’s largest corporations have used blues stars or their music to help sell their products. Musicians, painters, and artists of all sorts cite the music’s influence. The art is exquisite, but the conditions that created it were heartbreaking. One truth about the blues today remains little changed over the decades: it is still considered a music rooted in impoverishment.

  Perhaps that’s one reason why the cabin has been given mythic meaning, while Muddy’s home in Chicago, the place he lived when he made his most famous and memorable records, and made his money, has been virtually ignored. When we think of the blues, we often think of cotton fields and summer heat. But the reason the blues has affected so many different kinds of people in so many different cultures, the reason the music still speaks to us, is that the blues isn’t about place so much as circumstance. House of Blues may prefer the imagery of Mississippi Delta shacks, but the truth is that America is full of dead ends. The first time I saw Muddy’s Chicago home, it stood vacant and dilapidated. A group of local men, rangi
ng in age from fifteen to a hundred and fifteen, sat on the abandoned house’s stoop and in pieces of chairs scattered around the front yard. Each of their faces told a million stories.

  One of the men was Muddy’s stepson Charles Williams, who was raised in the house. Charles, known through most of his life as Bang Bang — “Bang Bang,” he explained, “he might do anythang” — still lived there. There was no electricity, no running water, and the windows and doors were boarded up. But, when it was not too cold outside, this was where Charles called home. I traipsed behind him through the vacant lot next to Muddy’s, stepping over broken glass and the detritus of a decaying neighborhood, into Muddy’s backyard. “This is the carport,” he said, standing beneath a low-roofed structure that would, by the time of my next visit, have blown over in the wind and been swept away as if it never existed.

  Like the front, the back was all boarded up. The four or so stairs that should have led to the landing outside the back door were gone. Charles scrambled smoothly up. I followed, with less grace and practice, using the space between bricks as a foothold; Charles pulled me up by the shoulder, even though I didn’t think I needed the extra help. We were backdoor men. “Step back,” he said, though there was little room for me to do so. He pulled at a corner of the board that covered the rear entrance, stooped, and like insects between floorboards, we crawled inside the shell of the home of Muddy Waters.

  Our eyes adjusted to the dim light that seeped in. The cupboards were in place over the kitchen counters, bare. The pantry was open. There was a hole in the middle of the kitchen floor wide enough for a large person to fall through. We moved across the room, stepping carefully. A hallway extended in front of us, sunlight breaking through rooms on the left, falling onto the right wall. The building felt charged with emptiness, a powerful vacancy. Dust stirred in the air, as if someone had just passed through.

  He took me to the room where Muddy slept, where Muddy lay in bed and watched the White Sox on TV. The wallpaper farthest from the window was still a pretty yellow. There was a pattern on it, something like a diner’s Formica countertop. It wasn’t hard to imagine a lamp in the corner, a night table, a bed — the feeling of life and activity was nearly palpable. We moved into the front room, where Memphis Slim and B. B. King and Leonard Chess and James Cotton sat and visited and sipped whiskey and gin and beer. Where the photograph of Little Walter graced the mantelpiece for nearly two decades. Where music and singles and albums were discussed and debated and breathed and created. Now this house, like Charles, like so many people in Muddy’s life, was on the verge of crumbling to dust.

  It would be easy to look at the irony of what is embraced and what is discarded in assembling the myth of Muddy Waters and say, “That’s the blues.” It is easy to put Muddy in that cabin, easy to relocate him and his rural beginnings around the world, a neat stitch in the American quilt — picturesque and just the right colors. But easy doesn’t make it so. The purity and simplicity of the blues — its primitiveness — is myth. The blues, like an emotion, is complex. Blues is the singing to relieve woefulness, feeling good about feeling bad. It’s a music born of pain, but it inspires pleasure, a vehicle that takes us from grief to relief. Muddy and his fans were aware of the conflict inherent in his later life, of being enriched by the poor man’s music. He was a longtime success in Chicago when, in 1970, he was asked if he’d like to go back to Mississippi. His response was emphatic: “I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?” Yet in his music, every time he played he went back, every note recalled the poverty and suffering of the Mississippi Delta. Musician after musician whom I interviewed talked about the way Muddy’s music changed so little; he stuck to the old, slow blues that he’d learned in Mississippi, and which evoked the life and the land there. “That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records,” Muddy said, referring to his music. “You can hear it all the way through.”

  In 1958 the Mississippi bluesman was in London. He had already cut his career-defining hits; he was on the cusp of assuming his role as patriarch of rock and roll. After this trip, the Rolling Stones, named for one of his songs, would form; their first number-one hit in America would be a thematic reworking of Muddy’s first hit — his “I Can’t Be Satisfied” would evolve into their “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

  Muddy was over the shock of these Brits speaking English and sounding nothing like him. He was over the shock of them driving on the wrong side of the road. He was over the biggest shock of all — that these people knew something about him, a farmer from the Mississippi Delta. He was sitting in a nice hotel room and speaking with a British journalist who had followed much of the tour. They’d become friendly and the writer knew Muddy’s history, knew his music, had heard him play live. But there was one thing that really perplexed him, and that he knew perplexed so many other blues fans and listeners. So how, this writer asked, how? How do you still have the blues?

  The question snapped Muddy like a broken guitar string. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money, the foreign funny money mixed in with some real American bills, and he waved the boodle over his head, around and around, showing it off as he answered. “There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to,” Muddy said. “When I play in Chicago I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues — the blues we used to have when we had no money.”

  Woe to the successful bluesman or blueswoman — or those who live to enjoy their success. He gets a little money in the bank, his authenticity is questioned. The fan demands, “Show me the poverty.” And yet, sometimes looking at a scar brings back memories of the wound. Perhaps the great artists are not always those still wounded, but those who remember. “I been in the blues all of my life,” Muddy said another time. “I’m still delivering ’cause I got a long memory.”

  Muddy Waters, for whom there was so little paperwork for so much of his life, was born into a culture that white society did not believe worthy of documentation. Some papers exist, but the panoply of racism, sexism, classism, and various other prejudices generally overshadowed the historical impulse. By the time the media began to document him extensively, his first career in music was over (as was his farming career), and he was enjoying renewed popularity with a new audience, a white audience. His relationship to whites had been formed in Mississippi; he was a grown man — thirty years old — when he left. He’d been trained to “yassuh” and “nossuh” on demand, to tell the white man what he believed the white man wanted to hear. (In addition to being an illiterate man from an oral culture, Muddy was generally quiet; one of his oft-expressed aphorisms was, “If you got something you don’t want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.”) Lomax’s field trips, predating World War II, were encumbered with all the paternalism inherent in those times. In some ways, that paternalism always exists. Cultures collide, and in that collision, nothing is unchanged. The explorer becomes a factor, the culture being viewed bears the taint of another’s eyes. A different writer interviewing the same musicians, lovers, family members, and business associates of Muddy’s would likely have left each interview with different results.

  Biography is the process of securing what is mutable. Undertaking the creation of one requires embracing the paradoxical: the writer is asked to create the skin and soul of a person, but not to inhabit it. Standing inside Muddy’s crumbling Chicago home with his stepson, I listened for the man who occupied it, saw where ghosts thrive, felt a pulse of the past still beating. On my most recent visit, the house had been stripped by rehabbers, the walls removed to the slats, the vestiges of the former occupant smashed, trashed, and hauled away. The renovation was being done for Muddy’s great-granddaughter, who recently purchased the property. His spirit will live on in the stories she tells.

  Muddy Waters shaped our culture: his song “Rollin’ Stone” inspired a band name and a magazine. When Bob Dylan went from acoustic folk
music to rock and roll, he hired white musicians who’d learned from Muddy in Chicago. Songs that Muddy wrote or made famous have become mainstream hits when performed by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and plenty of others. These musicians find in Muddy’s songs — and convey to others — an honesty about pain. And that is something to which everyone can relate. Everybody hurts, sometime.

  CAN’T BE SATISFIED

  CHAPTER 1

  MANNISH BOY

  1913–1925

  Muddy Waters usually told people he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. That’s in Sharkey County, the lower quarter of the Mississippi Delta. Rolling Fork was where the train stopped, where Muddy’s family would get their mail and do their shopping. Rolling Fork was on the map. But Muddy’s actual birthplace is to the west and north of there, in the next county over — Issaquena, pronounced “Essaquena,” the initial “e” the only thing soft in this hard land.

  Berta Grant, Muddy’s mother, lived next to the Cottonwood Plantation, at a bend in the road known as Jug’s Corner. It was a tiny settlement in the shadow of the Mississippi’s levee, a cluster of shacks and cabins undistinguished from most others in the Mississippi Delta. Among locals, however, Jug’s Corner was well known: they had the fish fries on Saturday nights.

  At Jug’s Corner, and throughout the Delta, farmhands partied on the weekend because they’d survived another week, because the land didn’t swallow them, the river didn’t drink them, the boss man didn’t kill them, and the mud, a half step from the dust and ashes from whence they came, did not engulf them.

  Muddy’s father, Ollie Morganfield, used to attend those Jug’s Corner frolics. Ollie was from the Magnolia Plantation on Steele Bayou, two miles between Jug’s Corner and Rolling Fork. Big boned and handsome, he could entertain with a guitar. “Ollie could play good blues,” said one long-lived resident of Issaquena County. “He’d go around, folks would get him to play at a party. Dark, tall, real friendly. Full faced. Sing? He used to holler. Played old-timey blues.”