“Yassir,” Muddy continued, “I knew the tune before I heard it on the record.” Then he told Lomax a little about Son House.
How did it come to you first that you wanted to play the guitar? Why did you decide?
I just loved the music. I saw Son Sims and them playing. I just wanted to do it and I took after them.
. . . Do you remember what the first piece that you ever tried to learn was?
The first piece I ever tried to learn was “How Long Blues,” Leroy Carr.
Did you learn that from a record or from seeing him?
I learned that from the record.
How would you do that? How would you learn that song?
We just heard the song, you know, it was put out, Leroy Carr done put it out.
Would you sit down with the record and play a little of it and then try to do it?
I just got the song in my ear and then went on and tried to play it.
What a field day for Work and Lomax. At this, their first interview, they found a man who could not only take them back to Charlie Patton’s world when the blues were an unformed, swirling mass about to come together like a tornado across the flat Delta jungle, but also could play in a style that indicated the music’s future. If they’d found Son House first, they’d have gotten a sense of the past and present, but his style was fully evolved and would remain the same for life. In Muddy Waters they found the perfect crux, the living breathing Mississippi Delta musical zeitgeist.
And how did you learn to play with this bottle?
Picked that up from Son House.
And what do you call that?
Bottleneck. I calls it a slide.
You call it a slide.
Yassir.
You wear it on your little finger.
Yassir.
And how do you have that guitar tuned, what’s the name of that tuning?
Spanish. [And Muddy strums D G D G B D — low to high, a musician in the know.]
. . . Well can you play that other country blues you played in there a while ago, that fast one? Is it in the same tuning here?
Yessir.
I’ll tell you when I’m ready.
Lomax returned to his seat on the porch. The tension, documented in Lomax’s field notes, was high between the field recordists — whose trip was this? — and John Work stepped to the doorway where he could watch Muddy perform. The signal was given, and we hear the bouncing, rollicking notes of “I Be’s Troubled” (titled “I’ve Never Been Satisfied” in John Work’s notes, titled “I Can’t Be Satisfied” when cut in Chicago), slide and strum working together to ride us like a tractor seat through the instrumental introduction, making the listener want to move, have to move.
If I feel tomorrow
Like I feel today
I’m gonna pack my suitcase
Make my getaway
I’m troubled, I’m all worried in mind
I never been satisfied
I just can’t keep from crying
This song has been perfected at Saturday-night fish fries and is a sure party pleaser. Muddy’s playing is smooth, and his performance of it must have been something for tired dancers to watch: the right hand accenting the beat like a drummer, the left hand careening up and down the neck, sometimes sliding and sometimes fretting, always in the right place, always percolating.
The first verse leaves the song’s subject open, but the story unfolds; it ain’t farm trouble what’s bothering him:
I know somebody
Sure been talking to you
I don’t need no telling girl
I can watch the way you do
“I Be’s Troubled” had barely ended when John Work immediately began speaking from nearby.
How did you come to develop that one, where did you first hear it?
I made it up my own self. That’s a song I made up.
How did you come to make it up? Tell us the story.
The reason I come to make that record up once, I was just walking along the road, I heard a church song, kind of mind of that, I just dealed off a little song from that. And I started playing it.
Do you make up verses and sing often like that, just sitting around —
Yassir, I make up verses pretty often, and I deal ’em up.
Then how do you get the music, the tune?
After I get my verses made up, then I come get my guitar and try it, two, three different tunes and see which one take the best with it, which is better to play it in, then I start.
Are there many of these country blues around in this neighborhood?
Yassir, ain’t so many around in here. Good little deal or two.
Most people around here like ’em?
Yeah, they crazy about them.
Work’s interview was cut short by Lomax, perhaps because the recording disc was running out. Lomax retrieved a second one (leaving an entire side unused) and Muddy played another original, “Number One Highway Blues,” about the road that ran right by his front door, the backbone of his universe. Then another interview, this one including Son Sims, followed by the duo playing their treatment of “The Worried Blues,” popularized in the area by the Mississippi Sheiks. Following that, Muddy sang “Corn Song” a cappella and then a version of Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues.” The recording session now over, Lomax and Work converted the contraption to something like a jukebox, playing back what they’d just recorded, with Muddy in both the audience and the spotlight. He heard himself sing.
These transcriptions by John Work III are from lost recordings by Muddy Waters. Courtesy of Fisk University Library, Special Collections
Afterward, as the equipment was loaded back into the car, Muddy told Lomax that he couldn’t see a big city in his future. As this field trip was preparatory to a more extensive one scheduled for October, Muddy was likely told to expect their return within a couple months. Discussion about recording his entire band may have ensued. The whole encounter took about seven hours, from the commissary meeting to Lomax’s brake lights reflecting red on Muddy’s eyes. But in that time, Muddy’s life had irrevocably changed.
Two days after Lomax and Work departed, Muddy dictated the first of several letters he’d send over the course of a year. These letters were spoken to a semiliterate field hand who picked up spare coin as a letter writer and reader. They are all written on five-by-eight-inch rag paper carefully pulled from a tablet; there is no fraying across the top. The pencil had each time been freshly sharpened — the heading of “Stovall” was in crisp and thin lead. The handwriting doesn’t quite stay on the lines; the periods that follow so many of the words may simply be where the writer is pausing.
At the time of the first writing, Lomax was still in the region. The morning after recording Muddy, he and Work went to Money, Mississippi, fifty miles to the southeast, recorded a Baptist church service, then doubled all the way back and more to catch an 8:30 Church of God in Christ service on the Moorhead Plantation near Lula. All this driving was not good for those precious discs with their glass base; Muddy’s second disc broke in transit and has not been played since Muddy heard it in 1941.
On the day Muddy wrote his first letter, Work and Lomax were interviewing a man who’d been indentured to Jefferson Davis; the following day, the researchers traveled to Lake Cormorant and met Son House.
Stovall. Miss.
Sept 2, 1941
Alan Lomard
dear Co.
this is the boy. that put
out Bur Clover Blues. and
number one high Way Blues.
and several. more. blues.
Want to know did they
take. Please sir if they did
please send some to Clarksdale. Missposie. sir
answer soon to.
M.C.
Morganfield
“Did they take?” Muddy Waters asked, using the language he knew — his songs were like a seed taking to the ground.
Half a year later, on March 17, 1942, Lomax w
rote to Muddy, asking him to sign a form allowing the Library of Congress to reproduce copies of “Country Blues” and “I Be’s Troubled” for use in an album. In return, he would be paid twenty dollars. Lomax also wrote, “I think the release of this record will serve to make you known in quarters where greater use might be found for your talent.”
Muddy would see Lomax again before he would see his money or his records.
Stovall Miss
April 29 1942
Alan Lomax
My dear trusty,
definitely a
I have answer your letter
and haven got any.
answer. from. you what
is the trouble. I thought
I. would. write you again
see have you got it
or not. it is all. right
to go. on. and do. what
you. want. to do with
the Records. Write me
and tell. me. what you
have doing. Be. sure
to send. me to of the
Records. please sir.
I. look for. answer. all
the time from. you.
I will close. from.
M.C.Kinley Morganfield
Stovall. Miss.
answer soon.
Lomax advised him to be patient and forwarded a government form for his signature.
Stovall Miss
June 25 1942
dear Alan. Lomax
I. thought I. wood write
you all about my check
I. am. still wating on it
but I haven got any
answer from. you all.
did you get the blank
that I. fill Write and
let me here from you
all. so answer soon.
to me from. your.
truly,
M.C.Kinney Morganfield
Stovall Miss
One of four letters sent by Muddy to Alan Lomax between September 1941 and June 1942.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center
Months passed without an answer. It is hard to know why Lomax ignored these letters; his own account of this time is somewhat self-serving. In 1993, fifty years after his two summers in the Delta and a quarter century after John Work III’s death, Alan Lomax wrote a book about his experiences. The Land Where the Blues Began won a National Book Critics Circle award, among other plaudits. In the book, Lomax relegates John Work to a single mention, an aside in the preface. (He also makes no mention of his 1941 trip, setting it all in 1942.)
In The Land Where the Blues Began, Lomax writes, “Gradually, I began to see Delta culture as the product of the reaction of a powerful African tradition to a new and often harsher social environment. . . . [B]lack African nonverbal performance traditions had survived virtually intact in African America, and had shaped all its distinctive rhythmic arts, during both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. It was this unwritten but rich African tradition that empowered the creativity we had encountered in the lower depths of the Mississippi Delta. The error in African American studies had been to look to print and to language for evidence of African survivals. For instance, musicologists discovered that American blacks performed many European-like melodies, but failed to notice that the whole performance context — voicing, rhythmic organization, orchestration — remained essentially African.”
Fifty-three years before Alan Lomax wrote the above, and one year before the first Delta expedition, John Work III wrote in the introduction to his book, American Negro Songs: “The fatal error made by many writers in this field is that in their analysis of these songs they relate altogether upon the verse, rather than upon the music. The Negro slave was too handicapped by inadequate vocabulary and too absorbed in the music to give much attention to the words. In many instances his verse was magnificent, yet throughout his songs we definitely sense the importance of music over words.”
Pioneers in any field create the context in which they can be criticized by those who follow in the privileged position cultivated for them. Lomax played an essential role in raising the public’s awareness of the beauty, importance, and significance of African American culture. Without his participation in the project, the “discovery” of Muddy Waters might have languished in the vaults of Fisk University. But in a world where authorship is authority, Lomax virtually erased the scholarship of John Work. Far more troubling than his blending of dates is Lomax’s refusal to acknowledge the contribution of others, especially of an African American whose ideas, research, and knowledge were pivotal to his own achievements. Bluesmen were much more generous and fluid in the exchange of inspiration and artistry. Lomax recorded the blues culture, but did not absorb the spirit of cooperation that made that culture thrive.
CHAPTER 4
COUNTRY BLUES
1941–1943
Three months after the initial visit by John Work and Alan Lomax, an event occurred in the Mississippi Delta that would have a profound effect on Muddy, on blues artists, and on blues fans. When it went on the air, radio station KFFA was a tiny place, but its impact was enormous. KFFA reached farther than the loudest juke joint and into every home, regardless of race, economics, or social station. The station broadcast right from the Mississippi Delta — the banks of Helena, Arkansas — and for the first time, the Delta heard itself. Man, it could sing.
KFFA was established by three businessmen. Sam Anderson teamed with John Franklin, of the Franklin Ice Company, and Quin Floyd, a truck-line owner; their surnames form the call letters. The studios were established in an office upstairs over Floyd Truck Lines, a block from the Mississippi River levee. The owners were businessmen, not radio engineers, and were more interested in paying rent to themselves than in the proximity of microphones to the din of roaring trucks. Broadcasting began in November of 1941.
Harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson and guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr. — two prominent musicians in the area — approached owner Sam Anderson with the hopes of getting a regular broadcast slot. Anderson knew a grocer around the corner interested in sponsoring a show. Max Moore’s Interstate Grocer Company had been packaging the King Biscuit brand of flour since 1931, and radio seemed like a great way to reach new customers. Dubbed King Biscuit Time, the program broadcast weekdays from noon to 12:15, and for half an hour on Saturday, coinciding with the field hands’ lunch break. “We did the very first show and it took off like a house on fire,” said “Sunshine” Sonny Payne, an early KFFA disc jockey. “The blues was something we heard every day on the street, and we took the blues for granted. I said, ‘These people aren’t going to go for [blues radio],’ but it was the best thing that ever hit this part of the country.”
Born Aleck Miller (or perhaps Aleck Ford) on December 5, 1899 (or perhaps 1897 or 1909), Sonny Boy Williamson was known to musicians by many names — among them Willie Williams, Willie Miller, Alex Miller, and Little Boy Blue. Those who knew him best called him Rice, despite his blatantly co-opting “Sonny Boy Williamson,” a name still in use by a popular harmonica player who’d been releasing blues hits on the Bluebird label since 1937.
Sonny Boy II, as Miller became known, was in his forties when his radio career started. A tall and lanky man, he made up in physical energy what he lacked in meat on his bones. According to Hank Harvey, who delivered laundry in Helena, “Sonny Boy in action was worth the trip. Even with the old Coca-Cola thermometer on the side of the grocery store pushing 100, he stood there in knee boots with slits cut in the sides. He wore a thick belt with loops for his harmonicas. When he played, he flapped his arms sometimes and did a dance step. He could make the harmonica cry or yell, or make it moan like a steamboat whistle if he wanted to. He got right up next to the microphone and played, then sang, and sometimes seemed to play and sing at the same time. He sometimes put the harmonica completely inside his mouth and played it that way.”
Although fifteen years Sonny’s junior, Robert Lockwood had been sharing gigs
with him for five years. Lockwood, with an ear for accompaniment, had fleshed out the pair’s sound with melodies and contrast. It helped that the innovative guitarist had received guidance around 1927 from his mother’s husband — Robert Johnson.
Lockwood and Williamson — the King Biscuit Boys — were paid a few dollars for each week’s six shows. The real money came through announcing their forthcoming gigs, directing an audience of thirsty patrons to the joint where they’d next be throwing down. Proprietors got packed houses and the band often took home more than their weekly wage in a single night. Muddy hired Sonny Boy and his band to play on Stovall. “He’d [announce] every spot they’re playin’ at,” Muddy explained. “You could hear it all over the country down there. Drew them peoples from all in the back of them cotton fields, everywhere.” Sonny Boy was the first harp player and Lockwood the first guitarist that Muddy heard playing through an amplifier. “Every time there wasn’t a radio around,” said Muddy, “I’d run to the next house where one was at to hear them play.”
If white cotton had made slaves of African Americans, white flour now made them paid musicians. And flour companies and blues seemed to get along, perhaps because so many black women worked in white kitchens. By reaching the black audience, the companies were in effect reaching white dinner tables as well.
“There was not much interference for KFFA’s two hundred fifty watts of power,” recalled Sonny Payne. “We would go anywhere from seventy-five to one hundred miles in four directions.” The King Biscuit Boys found themselves in demand at increasingly distant juke joints across the river, but they were not alone. An appearance on the show could be a huge career boost — something Muddy soon realized.
“I met [Sonny Boy] over in Helena,” Muddy remembered, his initial foray into the city only twenty miles from his house inspired by the radio program. “I went up, and he let me did a couple of numbers on one Saturday. We drove up to Friar’s Point — leave the car on this side — cross on the ferry to Helena. We went over one Friday and they had a show come on in the days. He let me and my buddy play a couple a numbers along with the band, Son Sims.”
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