Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  But as big and wild and slick as Memphis may have been, Chicago was of a different order. “Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was going to Chicago and get a record,” Muddy said. “He says, ‘You go along and you might get on with me.’ I thought, ‘Oh man, this cat is just jiving, he ain’t going to Chicago.’ I thought going to Chicago was like going out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard [1937], he had a record out.”

  By 1938, when he was twenty-five, Muddy’s reputation had spread more widely; he was known for playing “Bluebird Blues,” which he learned from the recent Sonny Boy Williamson record, featuring Big Joe Williams on guitar. He played in Friar’s Point for a man who’d taught him to fix cars. He played the Trump Club in Clarksdale, where tamales and watermelon slices were sold on the street. “I got big enough to start playing for the white things,” said Muddy. “I used to play Howard Stovall’s store for these [county agricultural] agents. A white dance, you could play a waltz all night long. And then you’d play them something a little jumpy, end up with ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World’ and they would get down.”

  By then, much like when her boy played in the mud, Muddy’s grandmother had to reconcile herself to her grandson’s ways. “My grandmother, she say I shouldn’t be playing, I should go to church. Finally, I say I’m going do this, I’m going do it. And she got where she didn’t bother me about it.”

  Yet, despite the occasional urban foray, Muddy’s world remained the backwoods. “Muddy stayed in the country a long time,” said Honeyboy Edwards, who’d been rambling far and wide. “When he come to Clarksdale, that’s the brightest place he was.”

  In the late 1930s, when the Silas Green traveling tent show set up in Farrell, three miles south of Stovall, Muddy attended. A traveling show was a major attraction, an alien culture bringing new ideas. Unlike the medicine shows, where the music was a vehicle for drawing crowds to whom elixirs with high alcohol contents could be sold, the Silas Green show was professional, a show built around music. These performers didn’t just count on tips, they had regular wages (or the promise thereof). And the show was on wheels — it was a way out of town, a way off the plantation. But Muddy’s brush with Silas Green was limited to Farrell. “I didn’t follow the show. I played with them right there for a night or two. We had five or six of us, we made a lot of noise out there.”

  Even if he had had the desire to move on, Muddy wasn’t sure where he should go. “I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, ‘Can I make it with my guitar?’

  “ ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doing now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago.’ ”

  Indeed, Chicago was still a jazz town, accustomed to sophisticated arrangements. RCA’s Bluebird label, its budget subsidiary that also targeted the black audience, had begun recording some of the rawer blues artists in 1933, but its focus (and its successes) was sweeter, ragtimey numbers, blues with the dust shaken off. Artists such as Tampa Red, the first Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Maceo Merriweather were playing a more up-tempo, danceable sound; Robert Johnson’s records had found an audience, but the buyers were not so much popular music fans as dedicated blues heavies. The growth of jazz reflected the penetration of African American culture into broader American society.

  Then there was St. Louis, where, it was said, blues changed its stride. The saying fits, referring not only to the stride piano stylings popular there, but also to the city’s location. During the Great Migration, when southern people used all available resources to strike out for a new life up north, passing St. Louis meant getting over the hump. Located halfway between Memphis and Chicago, St. Louis was a city of size — more industrial than Memphis, not as overwhelming as Chicago — and it had its own black city within a city: East St. Louis. St. Louis was both familiar and daunting, and it invigorated the travelers with a thrill and new excitement; it put a little more bounce in their step, a little more pep in their stride.

  Muddy knew of many great blues artists who called St. Louis home, including Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw (the devil’s son-in-law), and Charley Jordan. Pianist Walter Davis lived there, and Muddy had many of his records. If “going to Chicago was like going out of the world,” then St. Louis was the last stop within Muddy’s stratosphere. It was conceivable, reachable, possible. And so Muddy set out for an exploratory trip away from home but not out of this world.

  “In 1940 I went to St. Louis for a little while,” Muddy said, “and didn’t like it.” In his first taste of life outside the Mississippi Delta, he heard people speaking in mild midwestern accents and he encountered a town with more progressive ideas about race relations, though many of the faux-slavery attitudes of Mississippi were certainly still present. But perhaps most frustrating to Muddy was that his reputation did not precede him and that, musically, he would have to prove himself all over again.

  “He said he met Henry Townsend there, and some other musicians,” Jimmy Rogers, an early Chicago friend, remembered Muddy saying. “He was just up there scouting around, fooling around, trying to get hooked up with some people.”

  “I was trying to be a musician there,” Muddy said. “I stayed maybe a couple months or so. I wasn’t gettin’ enough work with my guitar, went back to Clarksdale.”

  Clarksdale was familiar, but it couldn’t help but seem even smaller and more isolated after St. Louis. Traveling shows beckoned and Muddy passed. St. Louis opened her arms and he just shrugged. Muddy Waters, it seems, could not be satisfied.

  CHAPTER 3

  AUGUST 31, 1941

  1941

  By the early 1940s, Muddy was famous in his “circle we was going in,” the skinny strip of Delta that fanned out from Clarksdale to the Mississippi River along Number One Highway. There were plenty of little back-road juke houses along there — he’d never want for a job — but it wasn’t exactly international fame.

  Muddy Waters’s first real break into the outside world came in the summer of 1941, during a field recording trip under the combined auspices of Nashville’s Fisk University and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He made his first recordings that summer and then several more the following summer when the group returned; a year after that, with the courage of a recording veteran, he would leave the Delta for Chicago. These encounters were perhaps the most crucial to his future career.

  The idea for the 1941 and 1942 expeditions — in which the recorded subjects would also include Son House, Honeyboy Edwards, Willie Brown, Fiddling Joe Martin, and Son Sims — began with Professor John Wesley Work III, a member of the music department at Fisk University, a prestigious black school in Nashville. For several generations, John Work’s family had been in Nashville’s community of black professionals. His father, also something of a folklorist, had been responsible for resurrecting the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the mid-1890s, presenting to America an African American alternative to minstrelsy and blackface.

  Work was skilled at operating Fisk’s Presto (Model D) portable disc recorder and had already made field recordings around Nashville. His philosophy, he explained in a speech at Fisk, was “that in each of your communities there is an abundance of significant folklore of which you have been generally unaware but which can easily be discovered and usually made available for the community’s appreciation and education.” In May of 1940, he realized the importance of a recording trip to Natchez, Mississippi, where a fire the previous month had killed two hundred black patrons of the Rhythm Night Club. “I would like very much to have the opportunity of collecting songs in that area next spring,” he proposed to Fisk’s president. “At that time, the anniversary of that fire, there undoubted will be many folk expressions and memorials. . . . To the abundance of folklore natural to the community, a new body of lore is due to be added. It is the ballads and music arising out of the holocaust of last April.”

  Searching for funds to finance the trip, Fisk contacted the Library of Congress.
Their Archive of American Folk Song, in the person of folklorist Alan Lomax, recognized the strength of the project and agreed to collaborate. Lomax was himself the son of a folklorist, John Lomax — a ranging collector for the Archive, with which he’d been associated since soon after its founding in 1928. Alan became the Archive’s first full-time employee in 1937. Work’s study jibed with the Lomax family’s perception of “folklore,” a more malleable notion than the reigning tradition in which the oldest songs — dating prior to the Industrial Revolution (indeed prior to the printing press) and unchanged by time — were considered purest; Alan and his father believed that the living folk and their input were as vital as the original source of the material.

  The Lomax family hailed from Austin, Texas, where a young Alan had witnessed subcultures of cowboys, Indians, and Hispanic people existing along with, but separate from, the affluent white society. In 1921, at the age of six, Alan started traveling with his father and in 1933 began assisting him with Library of Congress field expeditions. They used a portable disc recorder, documenting Texas cowboys, Louisiana Cajuns, Kentucky hillbillies, and Mississippi chain-gang singers. (The relative meaning of “portable” was evident in the machine’s weight of several hundred pounds.)

  By the time Fisk and the Library of Congress worked out their partnership, they’d shifted the site to Clarksdale, Mississippi — all of Coahoma County — the nation’s densest concentration of African Americans and the largest town in the Mississippi Delta. The goals of the joint field trip were summarized by Alan Lomax in a 1941 Library of Congress report: “The agreed-upon study was to explore objectively and exhaustively the musical habits of a single Negro community in the Delta, to find out and describe the function of music in the community, to ascertain the history of music in the community, and to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community.”

  Lomax and Work arrived in Coahoma County late in the evening on Thursday, August 28, 1941. “Everywhere we went,” Alan Lomax wrote to a friend, “we were asked point-blank, were we or were we not union organizers.” With World War II looming and the North’s factory work heating up, and with the threat of mechanized farming ever greater in the South, the Great Migration was achieving epic proportions. Farmers were afraid of losing their help before they could afford the technology that would replace them. And the prospect of their workforce organizing induced panic and resentment.

  Since churches were easier to find than blues singers — they were less mobile and more sober — Lomax and Work began recording services, and inquired after blues singers in the style of Robert Johnson. One name kept coming up.

  On Sunday the thirty-first, Lomax and Work arrived early and unannounced on the Stovall Plantation. They sought Captain Holt, the friendly, pipe-smoking overseer, and gained permission to mix with the black population, especially one “Muddy Water.” The singer, suspicious of being busted by a conniving moonshiner, came to the commissary before this stranger could find him at home. The trust between them was established by Lomax’s guitar, sealed with a whiskey, and then Lomax began setting up the equipment that Muddy had helped bring in. Lomax did not like for Work to handle the equipment. Son Sims had appeared by the time the bottle was being uncorked, and he accompanied Muddy on their original song “Burr Clover Blues” so recording levels could be set. While Lomax made final adjustments with the knobs, John Work conducted a brief interview with the two musicians. Asked to state their names, Muddy identified himself as “Name McKinley Morganfield, nickname Muddy Water,” then added, “Stovall’s famous guitar picker.”

  And so, on August 31, 1941, after lunch and before supper, Muddy Waters recorded one of the songs for which he was known in his neck of the Delta and for which he would later become known throughout the world. “Country Blues” was the name Lomax appended to it; “I Feel Like Going Home” was the title in John Work’s notes and the title when it took Chicago by storm a few years later. These first recordings were quite different from the electric versions Muddy would later record. They were about the marriage of acoustic space created by the human voice and a wooden guitar. “You get more pure thing out of an acoustic,” Muddy later reflected. “I prefer an acoustic.” The power in Muddy’s playing is comparable to the way a blade cuts rows into a field; his music is informed and defined by the immediacy of touching a string and the knowledge of how it affects the air around it.

  It’s a great performance, Muddy alone, singing and playing guitar. Unlike the emotional desperation of Robert Johnson, Muddy conveys power, the physicality of a human being worked by the system. In the voice of Robert Johnson, we hear the man who played hooky from fieldwork. In Muddy’s voice, we hear — we feel — the field, the plow, the dirt. “Country Blues” begins with high notes and tumbles low, inviting us in. The melody is instantly familiar; it was the basis of Son House’s “My Black Mama,” the same song that inspired Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues.” By picking some notes and simultaneously sliding along the neck with the bottleneck over his pinky, Muddy sounds like two people. He gives the song a rhythmic bounce, pinging a high note at the end of a line for emphasis. It’s not a boogie, it’s a slow number, but we can hear someone’s hip cocked north at a juke house, and the sound that hip makes when it swings south, riding the sharp ping like an undulating whip about to crack.

  The song evokes both the beauty and futility of the field hand’s struggle to survive. Comfort is found in the warmth of a lover’s body (“I feel like blowing my horn”), and her absence leaves a loneliness as big as the rural sky:

  It gets late on in the evening

  I feel like blowing my horn

  I woke up this morning

  and find my little baby gone. . . .

  Some folks say the worried blues ain’t bad,

  That’s the miserablest feeling child I most ever had. . . .

  Minutes seem like hours

  And hours seem like days

  Seem like my baby

  Would stop her low-down ways. . . .

  I been mistreated

  And I don’t mind dying

  After Muddy completed “Country Blues,” the recording captured him leaning back in his chair, a creaking, and then a bassy rumbling that becomes recognizable: footsteps crossing a wooden floor. It was Lomax, not stopping until he was right next to Muddy; he was speaking into the microphone when he said, “I wonder if you can tell me, if you can remember, when it was that you made that blues, Muddy Water?”

  Muddy answered straight away, a bit anxious and almost stepping on Lomax’s question. “I made that blues up in thirty-eight.”

  “Do you remember the time of the year?”

  “I made it up about the eighth of October in thirty-eight.” Muddy clustered his words together, with a halting nervousness between them.

  Lomax inquired in a comfortable, almost intimate voice. By this point, he, Work, and Muddy had been together several hours, during which Muddy had seen this untold dream unfold and assemble itself in his very living room. Lomax, realizing he could capture Muddy while this mood still hung, got close and casual.

  “I remember thinking how low-key Morganfield was, grave even to the point of shyness,” Lomax wrote in his field notes. “But I was bowled over by his artistry. There was nothing uncertain about his performances. He sang and played with such finesse, with such a mercurial and sensitive relation between voice and guitar and he expressed so much tenderness in the way he handled his lyrics that he went right beyond all his predecessors — Blind Lemon, [Charlie] Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown. His own pieces were more than blues, they were love songs of the Deep South, gently erotic and deeply sentimental.”

  Lomax’s questions continued: “Do you remember where you were when you were doing your singing, how it happened —”

  “— No I —”

  “No I mean, where you were sitting, what you were thinking about?”

  “I was fixing the punction [puncture] on a car, a
nd I had been mistreated by a girl and it looked like that run in my mind to sing that song.”

  “Tell me a little of the story of it if you don’t mind, if it’s not too personal. I want to know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. It’s a very beautiful song.”

  This white man complimented the field hand, and he answered like an artist: “Well I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind, come to me just like that song and I started to sing and went on with it.”

  Muddy may not have been in the boisterous voice he’d have when frying Saturday fish sandwiches and laughing with friends, but he was loosening up. Things were working out.

  Well, when you, do you know, is that tune the tune for any other blues that you know?

  Well yassir, it’s been some blues played like that.

  What tunes, other blues, do you remember that went to that same tune?

  Well this song comes from the cotton field and the boy went and put the record out, Robert Johnson, he put it out, “Walkin’ Blues.”

  What was the title he put it out under?

  He put it out, the name of “Walkin’ Blues.”

  Did you know the tune —

  Yassir —

  — before you heard it on the record?

  Muddy interrupted to answer, a bold action. But he’d been complimented, appreciated. And he may have been aware that the lathe was still cutting — cutting his very words into the acetate posterity of forever, and he probably wanted this white man from far away to know this music was important to him. Muddy appreciated the value, the impact, of recording. These two men, one comfortable in New York museums and the other among animal traps in muddy fields, were the objects of each other’s desires; each was helping the other achieve his goal.