Three years after seeing Son House for the first time, Muddy bought his first guitar. “I sold the last horse we had, made about fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother seven dollars and fifty cents, I kept seven-fifty and paid about two-fifty for that guitar. It was a Stella, a second-handed one.” He purchased the instrument from a player in the area, Ed Moore. “The first time I played on it I made fifty cents at one of those all-night places, and then the man that run it raised me to two-fifty a night, and I knew I was doing right.” When he’d socked away fourteen dollars in gig money, he ordered a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. “I had a beautiful box then.”
The first guitar piece Muddy learned was Leroy Carr’s “How Long Blues.” Carr was a piano player; the guitar was just coming into its own as a lead instrument, and many signature guitar riffs were transposed from the pounding piano. But Carr was unlike the barrelhouse players around Muddy. He played a smoother, more urban style, with a light edge to it. His playing, often accompanied by guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, captured a carefree, lackadaisical feel. Before Carr died at the age of thirty in 1935, he had achieved substantial popularity through his recordings. His style was antithetical to Son House’s, the two of them defining the range of influence on Muddy.
There were other influences too, among them Robert Johnson and the songster Charlie Patton, who added syncopation to material that had been relatively staid. Born in 1891, Patton was raised on the Dockery Plantation in the county adjoining Stovall’s. By 1910 — three years before Muddy was born — he had so developed his style that he was already attracting imitators. He sang in a heavy, bold voice, and his repertoire included spirituals, ballads, breakdowns, and Anglo songs familiar and pleasing to white plantation owners. His innovations with the slide and with the structure of songs — breaking from their Victorian roots to a more hook-oriented form — made him a cornerstone of modern blues.
“I saw Patton in my younger life days,” said Muddy. “What got to me about Patton was that he was such a good clown man with the guitar. Pattin’ it and beatin’ on it and puttin’ it behind his neck and turnin’ it over. . . . I loved that, but I loved Son House because he used the bottleneck so beautiful.”
As Muddy progressed, music became more than a hobby. “I worked for fifty cents a day from sun to sun. That means fifteen, sixteen hours a day. But on the sideline I loved my guitar. I would get out at night and do that guitar. The blacks have their parties, hustle a little liquor, get some things together, and I used to play for those peoples. They’d come get me on time but they wouldn’t bring me back on time. And lot of mornings I get home and change my little ironed blue jeans and put on my cotton-picking clothes and go to the field and work. Done picked cotton all day, play all night long, then pick cotton all day the next day before I could get a chance to sleep.”
Muddy also picked up extra money trapping furs. That again meant working after a long day in the field, setting and checking traps at night, but game was plentiful: possum, raccoons, rabbits, and mink. Mink hides paid the best; raccoons also sold, but possum and rabbit were thin-skinned and the hair came off too easily. All of the meat was fit to eat, or to sell as food. He’d stretch and dry the skins, then sell them in batches.
And all his life he’d made extra money assisting bootleggers. As a kid, Muddy would scout empty bottles and sell them back to the moonshiner. Homemade whiskey came in half-pints — called shorts — and also six-ounce bottles. He learned to make whiskey, though mostly he worked as a middleman. “We made the whiskey in canal ditches in the woods, hid off the highways. We’d get some of them fifty-gallon oil drums, that’s what you cook it in. You got to know how to burn it so ain’t no oil in there no more. You got to get the copper pipe, make a coil, get one of them big wooden barrels, that’s your cooling barrel. Get that flour dough and cinch up where your pipe go through so no steam come out. You start the fire. And you set there. You can’t rush the fire. It’s a baby, you got to nurse it. It start to doing its thing and you can hear the pipe start making a little funny noise. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. There it is. All of the South was dry then, the people so thirsty for it. . . . You make it, you sell it. No aging, no nothing. Sell.”
Whiskey, wild game, and music — the world over, that spelled party, and Muddy soon began hosting his own. “I’d have my own Saturday-night dances. I got hip and started making and selling my own whiskey, playing for myself. I had my little crap table going in the back. I’d put coal oil in bottles, take a rope and hang ’em up there on the porch to let people know my dance was going on, and I had a lot of them lights for people to gamble by. It’s pretty hard to see the dice sometimes in that lamplight. They had some fast boys with the dice down there, you had to have good eyes.
“At night in the country, you’d be surprised how that music carries. The sound be empty out there. You could hear my guitar way before you get to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollerin’ and screamin’.”
Money flowed around musicians and whiskey sellers, and Muddy, embracing technology, put a down payment on a used 1934 V8 Ford. “I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car,” said Muddy. “My grandmother said I’m going to kill myself. It didn’t run but thirty miles an hour, how you going to kill yourself? You could take a good fast horse and keep up with them.” The gravel road was hell on wheels then, and one local trick for beating flats was to fill the tubes with cotton seeds, then soak them until they’d swell up. You made do.
The car wasn’t just for fun. “He’d go back and forth to town to buy groceries and carry people,” said Magnolia Hunter, a neighbor. “He’d get him a carload, make a couple dollars.” Always hustling.
When cotton was not in season, farmers still kept their fields active. Muddy learned early he could pick up extra money following the crops, running from berry harvest to sugar-beet harvest to pea and bean harvest. Hopping rails made moving about easy, though the police plucked free labor for county penal farms by arresting hobos. “I rambled all the time,” Muddy remembered, “and that’s why I made that song ‘Rollin’ Stone.’ I was just like that, like a rollin’ stone. But I didn’t ramble that far. I was in love with my grandmother. She was gettin’ old, and I didn’t want to push out and leave her.”
Like a pollinating bee, Muddy made journeys that put him in contact with other musicians and playing styles not common around Stovall. “I knew Robert Nighthawk before I could pick nary a note on the guitar,” Muddy recalled. “That was in Clarksdale. We had one round circle — we all swam in that circle. Now he definitely knew Robert Johnson, because they all grew up around Friar’s Point way, from Friar’s Point over to Helena, and I stayed from Clarksdale down to Rosedale, and Duncan, and Hillhouse, Rena Lara, and all them places. We had a circle we was going in.”
Other musicians in their ring included Tommy Johnson, Houston Stackhouse, Robert Lockwood Jr., Joe Willie Wilkins, Rice Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson II), and Big Joe Williams. Big Joe was a peripatetic guitarist who encountered nearly all the Delta bluesmen in his rambles (and who invented his own nine-string guitar). “I played with Big Joe Williams when I was a kid,” said Muddy. “Used to blow harmonica with Big Joe.” Big Joe has claimed to be the first to take Muddy on the road, though that depends on how one defines the road. “I used to sorta pal around with him, but he do add a little bit to it,” Muddy said. “Really, I wasn’t travelin’ that much with him like he tell everybody. We went right around to a few places in Mississippi, we didn’t even get to Memphis.”
But Big Joe’s influence extended beyond just playing. He was proof that music could earn a man his living and that it had other payoffs as well. “Big Joe made Muddy quit coming around with him,” said Blewett Thomas, who was friends with Big Joe. “Joe said, ‘One morning I got up and left Muddy ’cause he was taking all my women away. All these women coming up going, “Oh, your little son’s so nice and attractive.” ’ ”
Muddy was tall and strong, “a big-sized man, good-conditioned fella” said Ma
gnolia Hunter, who worked beside him on Stovall, but his manner was more bashful than imposing. His skin was a deep, dark black, with hints of red and brown. His face was distinct: round and flat, with high cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes that hinted of Asian descent. Oh, those eyes. Almond shaped, the deep pools of blackness sharply demarcated by the extraordinary whiteness around his eyeballs. These eyes were seductive and alluring, and people drowned in them. Muddy wore a pained expression, not unlike a grimace, and spoke with a stutter; he charmed with his vulnerability and warmed with his virility. And he rarely said no. He liked to get his johnny pepper picked, his natural-born ashes hauled. “You got to keep your head when it comes to women and whiskey,” said Reverend Myles Long. “Muddy, he wasn’t so bad at whiskey, it was the women. The women messed him up.”
“Every girl I met mistreated me,” said Muddy. “I’m tellin’ you — every girl. Come into my teenage years, every girl I met mistreated me. I says, ‘Do I have a curse on me? Why everybody got something but me?’ ”
But if the girls burned him when he was young, Muddy spent his life spitting back fire. He went through several wives, and always had women on the side, and women on the other side too. “Cotton-field women” was what the men called an easy lay in that land; you didn’t even need to make a pallet on the floor.
The first of Muddy’s wives was a girl on Stovall named Mabel Berry. Her brother played guitar in a string band popular in the area, the Son Sims Four. “Mabel was a tall, skinny, dark lady, nice looking,” said Elve Morganfield. “She worked on the farm. Very soft-spoken, very easygoing, didn’t hardly raise no sand about nothing. She got along with people, but she’d get you up off her.” On November 17, 1932, Muddy traveled to the Coahoma County clerk’s office and bought a license to marry Berry. Three days later, on the twentieth, the wedding took place. Muddy returned to Clarksdale on the twenty-fourth to file the marriage certificate. They lived with his grandmother. He was nineteen years old.
“Robert Nighthawk played at my first wedding,” Muddy said. “Him and Percy, his brother. Supposed to been his brother — I don’t think they was brothers though. Robert was popular all over Mississippi.” The wedding party got so wild that Muddy’s floor fell in. But the joy didn’t stay in the marriage. “He had a lot of trouble with his first wife, Mabel,” remembered Myles. “He was running around on her. He’d make a lot of money at the juke house, then spend it. Easy come, easy go.”
“Muddy was a good guy,” said Elve, “but he was a man. He said that in his song. Muddy loved women. Just like any other man, you supposed to love a woman. But you ain’t supposed to try to have all of ’em.”
A guitar player could get a break in a string band. The fiddle, because it was louder, usually played lead, but occasionally the guitarist could step out and solo. The most popular string band of the era was a local group, the Mississippi Sheiks. They’d been playing most of Muddy’s life, but became stars in 1930 with “Sitting on Top of the World.” “They was high-time through there, makin’ them good records, man,” said Muddy. “Anytime they’s in my vicinity, I was there. Walk, catch a ride on a wagon, steal a mule out of her lot — I was there.”
The Son Sims Four were in the Sheiks’ mold. Henry “Son” Sims played fiddle; he’d been associated with Charlie Patton since 1910 and recorded with him in Wisconsin in 1930. Born on August 22, 1890, near Rolling Fork in Anguilla, Mississippi, he was the grandson of a slave who also played fiddle. Sims was not the most accomplished musician, but he was versatile — he played the piano, bass, viola, mandolin, and guitar. “Kinda like a saw” was how Sims’s sister described his fiddling. “He didn’t put any resin on. I didn’t take time to ask him about the roughness, I’d be enjoying the music.”
Sims formed the band in 1922. Guitarist Percy Thomas, who played a black Stella guitar and the kazoo, set a foundation for Sims’s fiddling, and he also sang. They recruited an older mandolin player (and occasional vocalist) from Farrell named Lewis Ford, and rounded out the lineup with a rotund man on bass known to history only as Pittypat (for the percussive sound he made with his bare feet), who also entertained the crowds with dancing. They played a white square dance for a Clarksdale social club on the first Friday of each month at the Riverside Hotel.
In 1933, Percy Thomas recalled, Muddy got into Sims’s group as a singer. Before long, the Son Sims Four started to call on Muddy’s other skills. His harmonica playing was a nice complement to their sound, and his guitar work — well, he had his own guitar and he was learning fast. “We played juke joints, frolics, Saturday-night suppers, we was even playing white folks’ parties three or four times a year,” said Muddy. “My boss really liked that kinda carrying on. He’d give a party and he’d get me to come do his things for him. Sometimes the fish fries didn’t have enough money to pay the four or five of us — just two of us had to go. Me and Son Sims, we’d play there sometimes by ourselves. Or somebody’d sit in with us, maybe me and Lewis Ford. Some harp player come by and we let him jam. We really just have a good time.”
On May 1, 1935, twenty-two-year-old Muddy had his first child, Azelene. Her mother was Leola Spain. “She was a little brown-skinned country girl,” said Magnolia Hunter. “Kinda smallish, wasn’t heavy.”
“She was a young little girl,” remembered cousin Elve. “Nice figure, about five foot three, nice grade of hair. She wasn’t over sixteen. Muddy went for beautiful women, young women. That’s all I ever knew him to like. Leola was married to a man named Steve, and she was going with a guy named Tucker. Her husband caught them together. It gets complicated.” And Muddy was in the middle. Mabel, tired of being on the outside, left Muddy, not even bothering with divorce papers, and moved to Chicago.
Though he ultimately established a household and kept a home for twenty years with a wife in Chicago (and several outside women), he never lost touch with Leola. She followed him to Chicago, and there from the West Side to the South Side. “They always had a special bond with each other,” said Amelia “Cookie” Cooper, the couple’s grandchild, “all through his life until his death. He kept a very good tie with my grandmother because of the child that they had and then once the grandchildren came it made the bond even closer.” Throughout all the women Muddy picked up and discarded, Leola was the only one with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship.
As Muddy was becoming more accomplished and more confident, he saw many of his friends and acquaintances releasing records. Tommy Johnson began recording in 1928. Robert Nighthawk’s first recordings featured backing from Big Joe Williams. The Chatmon Brothers, Skip James — his running buddies, his moonshine pals — were now recording artists. Muddy sought the popularity of Leroy Carr and the force of Son House, but insisted on an identity of his own. He knew it was possible to take the influence of others and create something unique. He’d seen one of his neighbors do just that: Robert Johnson.
Robert Johnson’s two recording sessions, before he was murdered in 1938, have made him the most popular of the early blues artists. He was born, raised, and he died in the Mississippi Delta. His legend, even during his lifetime, grew around the sudden facility of his playing; reportedly he’d made a deal with the devil. But what has kept his name at the fore is his command of the form, his artistry with the three-minute song. Each of the twenty-nine songs in his legacy is carefully crafted — the musical hook, the lyrical image, the totality of the piece — a conscious recognition of the recording process, its limitations, its possibilities. He recycled melodies and words, sometimes nearly the whole of a song, but he reshaped them into creations of his own, singularly passionate manifestations that have reached across generations.
Johnson recorded and was killed before Muddy faced a microphone, but they were of the same musical generation, each descended directly from Charlie Patton through Son House. “I loved [Robert Johnson’s] music,” Muddy said. “I first heard him when he came out with ‘Terraplane,’ and I believe ‘Walkin’ Blues’ was on the other side. I always followed his records ri
ght down the line.” Muddy had only seen him once, on the street in Friar’s Point, and the experience had been overwhelming. “People were crowdin’ ’round him, and I stopped and peeked over. I got back into the car and left, because he was a dangerous man . . . and he really was using the git-tar. . . . I crawled away and pulled out, because it was too heavy for me.”
Little commercial recording was done in the Delta; musicians were taken to Chicago, or the East Coast, or Grafton, Wisconsin. Sometimes labels would hold sessions in hotels — in Memphis, in Jackson, in Dallas. Muddy, like most Delta residents, would make occasional trips to Memphis, the largest city in the region. There, on the Delta side of town, was Beale Street — Harlem of the South — where black lawyers and dentists offered their services alongside bookies and hookers. And in the center of Beale Street was a park. Music and card games were plentiful. On weekends it was an open-air market where you could find anything fresh: fruit, corn liquor, women, dope. On weekdays, it was harder to find fruit.
“Memphis,” said Muddy, a pause afterward indicating the enormity of the city. “M-E-M-P-H-I-S, only thing I can spell yet. I can’t even spell Clarksdale. Memphis was up north. Beale Street was the black man’s street. Memphis was like you was going almost to California. Get in a car going to Memphis, you’d change drivers: ‘You drive some, I’m tired.’ That road wasn’t very good and your tires wasn’t very good. Me and Son Sims, sometime we’d go up to Memphis just to come back for the big word: ‘We’s in Memphis last night.’ ”
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