“We’d get up early in the morning, we’d work all day, and the only sound I recall from nights were crickets hollering,” said the Reverend Willie Morganfield. “You really didn’t get much of a chance to hear anything because when you’d go to sleep, you’d just sleep.”
“It was really dark out there,” said Muddy’s cousin Elve Morganfield. “But when you’ve been in the dark so long, you get used to it, you learn to see your way.”
Had Muddy been born half a century earlier into slavery, or half a century later, his living conditions would not have been much different. The Delta land itself rebels against change; when the seasons move from cold to warm, tornados wreak havoc, one wind battling for change, the other for the status quo. But the music would have been different. Muddy Waters was raised on a musical cusp, coming of age at the time the blues was crystalizing as a genre. The catalyst was the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, when a large population of blacks were unmoored, searching for their place in a society which had previously defined them as chattel. Like a kiln, this integration fired the mix of Anglo-Scottish ballad traditions and jigs (which had cascaded down the mountains and into the Delta like water into a basin) with the existing dominant form in black music — string bands, led by violins and banjos, with mandolins and guitars playing two-chord breakdowns. The blues, born of the frustration of freedom, began taking shape.
Blues came from hardship and became nothing less than a tool for survival. Like gospel music, blues offered release, relief. It commands the present moment, demanding that you forget the toil of your past, forget the woes ahead, that you get into this song and this feeling right now and give yourself over entirely to it. Though the blues draws from a large pool of preexisting lyrics, couplets, game songs, and sayings, it is a deeply personal sort of music. Its generic lines always combine with the singer’s own thoughts and expressions. (In “I Feel Like Going Home,” Muddy follows “Brooks run into the ocean / the ocean runs into the sea” with “If I don’t find my baby, somebody’s sure going to bury me.”) Over the years, the form has become somewhat standardized, with many blues fitting a twelve-bar pattern and taking the lyrical shape of AAB — the first line (often a generic truth) repeated twice, and then resolved in the more intimate third. But many of the masters disregard convention and create their blues in the way that suits them best. At that moment. At that time. Do it again? It’ll be different. Songs are feel over form, eleven bars or thirteen or thirty bars. The singer changes chords when he’s ready and not according to formalistic demands. If he’s getting down with one particular verse and wants to drag it on, he does. This is especially easy when performing solo, but any accomplished blues accompanist knows to change when the leader changes and not to count measures. Muddy called himself a “delay singer” because people — the audience and the band — “have to hang around and wait and see what’s going to happen next.”
One of the earliest descriptions of blues comes from a 1903 article in the Journal of American Folklore, written by Charles Peabody, an archaeologist who was excavating Indian mounds near Stovall. He noted “the distichs and improvisations in rhythm more or less phrased sung to an intoning more or less approaching melody. These ditties and distichs were either of a general application referring to manners, customs, and events of Negro life or of special appositeness improvised on the spur of the moment on a topic then interesting.” He cites several refrains that remain common in blues songs a century later (“They had me arrested for murder / And I never harmed a man” and “Some folks say a preacher won’t steal / But I found two in my cornfield”). Peabody even found himself — his idleness — a subject of their work songs (“I’m so tired I’m most dead / [He’s] sittin’ up there playing mumblely-peg”).
Also in 1903, W. C. Handy, who would be the first to write sheet music for the blues, had been playing waltzes and other formal styles with his Knights of Pythias Band and Orchestra when he heard a guitarist sliding the neck of a bottle along his strings at a Delta train station. The sound, he wrote in his autobiography, was “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” That same year, in Cleveland, Mississippi, he encountered his first blues band, a trio featuring “a battered guitar, a mandolin, and a worn-out bass.” Handy described the trio’s music as “disturbing . . . agonizing . . . haunting,” and continued, “I commenced to wonder if anybody besides small-town rounders and their running mates would go for it. The answer was not long in coming. A rain of silver dollars began to fall. . . . There before the boys lay more money than my nine musicians were being paid for the entire engagement. Then I saw the beauty of primitive music.”
The introduction of the bottleneck style was essential in moving the guitar from the rhythm section of a group to the fore. Sliding a bottleneck across the strings produces a metallic, keening sound that was refined to high art in the Mississippi Delta. The bottleneck — sometimes a butter knife or penknife — could be applied to one or several of the strings, creating a whining sound that complemented the natural ambiguities of the human voice. The slide could also be pounded like a smooth fist along the guitar’s neck to add impact and intent to the singer’s plaint. When coaxed by an accomplished player, the slide guitar became an extension of the voice, a responsive chorus, an animate entity, called forth and evoked like a spirit, with a character of its own. It also created volume enough to be heard over the din of a raucous good time. The hand’s movement when playing slide is like a beckoning, taking in the listener: “C’mon with me, don’t you want to go? I’m going up the country, where the water tastes like cherry wine.”
Muddy’s introduction to the blues came early, in the dark seclusion of the rural countryside. “Our little house was way back in the country,” Muddy said. “We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would’ve been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn’t nobody hear you. . . . The lady that lived across the field from us had a phonograph when I was a little bitty boy. She used to let us go over there all the time, and I played it night and day.” These were the earliest “race” records, recordings made after the Okeh label had taken a chance in 1921 and released Mamie Smith’s “The Crazy Blues”; it sold seventy-five thousand copies in a month and announced the presence of the African American record-buying audience. Many existing popular-music companies formed subsidiary labels with their established names nowhere evident, afraid of the association with black music.
Muddy also listened to his preacher — to an extent. His childhood friend Myles Long, who himself became a preacher, remembered, “On Stovall, there’s a church and on up the road to Farrell, there was another church. You look up the road, there’s another church on another plantation, and there’s another church on up the road. Churches in walking distance of the houses.” The Fisk University sociologist Lewis Jones, who did fieldwork around Stovall, wrote in late 1941, “There are perhaps more churches than stores and schools combined.” In the world of the field hand, the church was a dominant force.
Church folks did not appreciate blues. “My grandmother told me when I first picked that harmonica up,” said Muddy, “she said, ‘Son, you’re sinning. You’re playing for the devil. Devil’s gonna get you.’ ” But in fact church spirituals and the rhythms of preaching were quickly incorporated into the blues, and within decades were supplanted by this new style. By the middle of the twentieth century, the power of the church was losing influence to the power of the blues. The essential difference between the blues and spirituals was summed up in 1943 by John Work, the pioneering black musicologist from Nashville: “The spirituals are choral and communal, the blues are solo and individual. The spirituals are intensely religious, and the blues are just as intensely worldly. The spirituals sing of heaven, and of the fervent hope that after death the singer may enjoy the celestial views to be found there. The blues singer has no interest in heaven, and not much hope in earth.” And yet without the church, there could have been no blues. Perhaps it goes back to what Muddy’s cousin Elve s
aid about plantation life: “But when you’ve been in the dark so long, you get used to it, you learn to see your way.” The blues and gospel music were two different lanterns, but the path that they illuminated, if forking ahead, had a single origin.
Under the care of his grandmother, Muddy attended church every Sunday. Services were lively, and they built to an emotional frenzy. “You get a heck of a sound from the church,” said Muddy. “Can’t you hear it in my voice?”
Soon people would.
CHAPTER 2
MAN, I CAN SING
1926–1940
In these communities without electricity, acoustic instruments, makeshift and manufactured, were a chief source of entertainment: a guitar, harmonica, paper on a comb. The smaller instruments could be carried in a pocket, retrieved during a work break to help transport the soul to a kinder place. Initially, Muddy beat on a kerosene can, then squeezed an old accordion around his grandmother’s house (“It was old, I sort of ramshacked it on out”), then fooled with the limited sounds of a Jew’s harp. “All the kids made they own git-tars,” Muddy remembered. “Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn’t do much with it, but that’s how you learn.”
It took Muddy six years to master the harmonica. “I was messing around with the harmonica ever since I got large enough to say, ‘Santy Claus, bring me a harp,’ ” said Muddy. “But I was thirteen before I got a real good note out of it.” When he made too much racket in the house, his grandmother told him to take it outside, where he blew it some more, picking up quick lessons from more accomplished players as well as a penny or two from a passing, sympathetic ear.
At Stovall, Della had purchased her own phonograph, powered by a hand crank. “My grandmother didn’t buy hardly anything but church songs,” Muddy said. “But I got hold of some records with my little nickels, and borrowed some, listened to them very, very carefully. Texas Alexander and Barbecue Bob and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake — they was my thing to listen to. And to get down to the heavy thing, you go into Son House, Charlie Patton. Roosevelt Sykes been playing at ‘Forty-Four Blues’ on the piano, I thought that’s the best I ever heard. And then here come Little Brother Montgomery with ‘Vicksburg Blues,’ and I say, ‘Goodgodamighty, these cats going wild.’ ”
He was “a kid,” he said, when he knew he wanted to be famous. “I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn’t play ball too good — I hurt my finger and I stopped that. I couldn’t preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.”
It was Blind Lemon Jefferson who, in 1926, made record companies aware of the country blues market, the style of blues pervasive in the Mississippi Delta. Earlier in the decade, blues songs usually featured female singers, such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, backed by jazzy, orchestra-influenced ensembles. Soon after Blind Lemon, Charlie Patton recorded, then Son House, Skip James, Tommy McLennan, and many more. There were other types of music available, but Muddy had no interest. His emotions did not resonate to Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, or Arturo Toscanini. Paul Whiteman was not in his universe, nor Fanny Brice, Maurice Chevalier. The Harry James Orchestra was not playing in any of the towns nearby. A little country or gospel sometimes on a stray radio, but when it came to records and Muddy, it was basically all blues, Mississippi Delta blues.
“Every man would be hollering but you didn’t pay that no mind,” Muddy told author Paul Oliver. “Yeah, of course I’d holler too. You might call them blues but they was just made-up things. Like a feller be working or most likely some gal be working near and you want to say something to ’em. So you holler it. Sing it. Or maybe to your mule or something, or it’s getting late and you wanna go home. I was always singing just the way I felt, and maybe I didn’t exactly know it, but I just didn’t like the way things were down there — in Mississippi.”
Myles Long, who took a job cooking and driving for Mrs. Stovall instead of moving up north, said of his friend, “In the fields, Muddy would always be humming something.” Muddy later recalled, “When I was comin’ up, of course I had no ideas as to playin’ music for a livin’. I just sing the blues ’cause I had to — it was just somethin’ I had to do.”
“Muddy wasn’t a fellow that hung around people too much, but he had his associates in music,” said Elve Morganfield. Muddy palled around with a guy named Ed Moore, who could thump on the guitar and liked to be with musicians. Buddy Bo Bolton liked to mess around at the fish fries and honky-tonks. And there was a tall guy, slightly older, named Scott Bohaner (often misidentified as “Bow-handle”), who owned a guitar, was a bit heavyset, and favored overalls. “We learnt together,” Muddy said. “I was playin’ harp then. I used to watch him makin’ chords and try to copy them. After I learned guitar, he just played second guitar, but he played lead when I was blowing harmonica.”
Before too long, Muddy went a bit more public with his passion. “Cotton farming, you don’t have too many ‘cabaret nights,’ ” Muddy said. “Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for fifty cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.” At their first gig, Muddy and Bohaner were given a dollar and half a pint of moonshine between them; they each got their own fish sandwich.
Stovall had a baseball team and Muddy played second base, but there were other diamonds that glittered brighter. Merchants in Clarksdale, the Delta’s shipping center, would send trucks on circuits through the country, picking up rural customers on Saturdays. So many blacks would fill the Clarksdale streets, cars couldn’t get through. Whites would sometimes park at the edge of the activity and watch. A barber would set up his chair, the beautician would lay out her supplies. You could get your clothes pressed, your shoes shined. There were sharp suits and hats, there were revellers and dandies. Musicians shacking up in the vicinity played in front of the furniture store, where furniture-sized phonographs were sold, as were the records to play on them.
Clarksdale had pool halls and beer joints for African Americans. Many of the clubs hired musicians, though the newfangled jukebox was steadily taking many of those gigs. But Clarksdale also had something that the country juke joints didn’t — a curfew. “Twelve o’clock you’d better be out of there,” said Muddy. “You had to git off the streets. That great big police come down Sunflower with that big cap on, man, just waving that stick. You had to go in the country.” Bootleggers and others who ran juke joints would come into town by afternoon and see who was drawing crowds. They’d hire the entertainer — and thereby his crowd — to bring it on down to the bootlegger’s place.
The country was wide open with gambling and music. This was a land where “juke joint” rhymed with “half-pint,” and where the heating liquid Sterno was consumed for kicks; it was known as “canned heat” but pronounced “can-dy.” “They would have the parties just where they lived at,” said Muddy. “They would put the beds outside and have the whole little room to do their little dancing in. They’d pull up a cotton house [a covered trailer used during harvest] and that’s their little gambling shed. And they made lamps with coal oil. Take the plow line that they plows the mule with, stick it in a bottle, put a little wet on top and light it, had lamps hanging all around like that.”
“You’d find that house by the lights shining in the trees,” said bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, a contemporary of Muddy’s. “You’d get about a quarter mile from that house and you hear the piano and the guitar thumping; you start to running then.”
“When you were playing in a place like that, you sit there on the floor in a cane-bottomed chair, just rear back and cut loose. There were no microphones or PA setups, you just loud as you can,” said Johnny Shines, a bluesman who traveled with Robert Johnson. “The thing was to get the womens there to get the mens there so they’d gamble. And [the man throwing the party], he’d cut the game, get his money that way. Sell whiskey too. . . . Beer was served in
cups, whiskey you had to drink out of the bottle. They couldn’t use mugs in there because the people would commit mayhem, tear people’s head up with those mugs. Rough places they were.”
“At that time,” Muddy said, “seem like everybody could play some kind of instrument and there were so many fellers playing in the jukes ’round Clarksdale I can’t remember them all. But the best we had to my ideas was Sonny House. He used to have a neck of a bottle over his little finger, touch the strings with that and make them sing. That’s where I got the idea from.”
Muddy was fourteen years old when he first saw Son House perform. Son House was a powerful guitar player and a formidable presence. He could be as even as the rows he furrowed as a tractor driver, or as fiery as the harsh white whiskey he liked to drink. Tall, angular, and bony, he had a deep, gravelly voice, coarse as a leveeman’s holler, that carried easily over a packed juke house. A hammer of a man, a lanky, hard-hitting slide player, House favored a steel guitar, a Dobro-like instrument with a more metallic sound than the wooden guitar. His style was very percussive; he struck the strings with vehemence. His upstroke was as powerful as his down and, in combination with the slide over his finger, he sounded like a lineman driving steel. Listening to Son House was as bracing as a coldcock punch.
“I stone got crazy when I seen somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck,” Muddy said. “My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn. I used to say to Son House, ‘Would you play so and so and so?’ because I was trying to get that touch on that thing he did.” Muddy was awed by this lanky wizard. He’d been previously getting pointers from an older boy on Stovall named James Smith. “When I heard Son House, I should have broke my bottlenecks because this other cat hadn’t learned me nothing. Once, [Son House] played a month in a row every Saturday night. I was there every night, close to him. You couldn’t get me out of that corner, listening to him. I watched that man’s fingers and look like to me he was so good he was unlimited.”
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