Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  His King Biscuit appearance upped Muddy’s star quotient. “If we got a chance to set in and do a couple of songs, man, when we got back on Stovall, that was the whole talk. Everybody that’s heard it on the radio was running, telling all the people all on the plantation, ‘I hear them, man, I hear them, they on it!’ ” Indeed KFFA’s impact on Muddy was so forceful that fulfilling the dream of having his own show there would draw him back for an extended stay even after he had achieved success in Chicago.

  King Biscuit Time pioneered black radio programming, and its success did not go unnoticed. Black programming spread from Greenville, Mississippi, to West Memphis, Arkansas. By 1948, in the big city of Memphis, WDIA became the nation’s first radio station to format black voices on the air, programming for black listeners — full-time. Technology was presenting new types of mobility to Muddy and his peers. Most of the great Delta artists performed on King Biscuit Time or its competitors. Reputations were built on the show. With blues radio, the modern blues star was born.

  In mid-April, 1942, after the chance of freeze had passed, Muddy mounted Colonel Stovall’s tractor to harrow the ground. In mid-June, with the plants a foot high, he manned a hoe to chop cotton. When his plants were set with blossoms, Muddy enjoyed his lay-by. With time on his hands, he might have reflected on St. Louis, time and distance making what had seemed cold and foreign less daunting, the thrill and excitement of a fast-paced city now taking on a dreamy glimmer. And he might have looked forward, wondering about the white man from Washington, D.C., and his black university associate. Would they come back? Had Muddy been forgotten?

  He had not. After several delays, Alan Lomax arrived in Nashville on the evening of July 12, 1942, driving his new green Hudson Super Six. Air-conditioning was not yet standard in automobiles, and he arrived hot and bothered, writing in his field notebook, “Violently hot all day in this filthy and ugly old town.” One day down, fourteen to go.

  Lomax had assumed authority over the study and arranged for John Work to be excluded from this return trip: proprietary tensions, personality conflicts, operation of the recording machine — they didn’t get along. As a replacement, Lomax enlisted a member of the Fisk sociology department, Lewis Jones, with whom he’d struck a friendship on his previous visits to the university.

  Friday, Lomax and “Sr. Eduardo from Sao Paulo” (a sociology student of Jones’s) stopped in Tunica County, where Lomax reunited with Son House. This time, he pushed further for information on Robert Johnson. Interest in Johnson’s blues and his life had continued to build since his murder in 1938.

  “How it come about that [Robert Johnson] played Lemon’s style is this,” Lomax reported House saying. “Little Robert learnt from me, and I learnt from an old fellow they call Lemon down in Clarksdale, and he was called Lemon because he had learnt all Blind Lemon’s pieces off the phonograph.”

  With his luck running high, Lomax forged on, his previous year’s discovery affirmed: “But isn’t there anybody alive who plays this style?”

  House replied, “An old boy called Muddy Waters ’round Clarksdale, he learnt from me and Little Robert, and they say he gettin’ to be a pretty fair player — that’s one. And they’s me, but I about done quit. I’m getting to be an old man.” (Son House was all of thirty-nine; he would live another forty-six years and enjoy a second career.)

  A week later, Lomax reunited with Muddy. “Spent a fine day with my old cronies — Muddy Waters, Son Simms [sic], and their friends on the Stovall Place — five miles east [from the King and Anderson Plantation, where Lomax was staying and where the Fiskites were studying farm life]. Planned another session for Monday [July 27]. They really like me.” The previous month, Muddy had written Lomax about the check and records he’d been promised; he’d not yet been paid, and Lomax made no note of Muddy inquiring in person.

  There was, however, an entire evening devoted to interview. On July 29, Lomax visited Muddy’s home. With the family gathered — Della, Uncle Joe, Muddy and his live-in girlfriend Sallie Ann Adams — Lomax took out his pen and the four mimeographed sheets of paper that he’d titled the Tentative Family Schedule, a questionnaire developed for the Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study. In addition to information on education, labor, and travel experience, the final page was entitled “General Musical Questionnaire,” reflecting the emphasis of their study. On this page, Muddy cited the kind of music he liked best: Blues. Why? “I can play it a little bit.” He added, “I don’t hardly ever have the blues, but just plays ’em. I don’t have the blues when I play ’em.” He does go on to say, should his qualifications be questioned, that “women done quit ’im.”

  For the 1942 Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County visit, Alan Lomax created a four-page questionnaire, with one page devoted to music.

  This is Muddy’s questionnaire. Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archives

  What songs did you know when you were a child?

  “I Don’t Want No Black Woman to Charley Ham My Bones.”

  What bands do you listen to on the radio?

  Fats Waller.

  Who is your favorite musician?

  Walter Davis (on Bluebird records).

  Which do you prefer, Negro or white music and why?

  Negro — got more harmony — in the blues line — white people can’t play ’em.

  In his field notes, Lomax wrote that Muddy “plays at country balls two or three times to seven times a week. Fall the biggest time — plays mostly in the country and immediate neighborhood. Private houses give the parties — two of us get $6 — the whole band gets $16 for a picnic or something like that.” (He also noted that Muddy “Just wasn’t a hand to dance — sometimes you be dancing with a girl and people snatch her and go on so I just never did try to learn.”)

  The evening concluded with an extensive listing of Muddy’s repertoire. Its range reflected his disparate audience — gutbucket blues (“I Be’s Troubled”), smoother black pop songs (“St. Louis Blues”), white country-and-western numbers (“Deep in the Heart of Texas,” Gene Autry’s “Be Honest with Me”), waltzes (“Missouri Waltz”), and the occasional pop pap (“Red Sails in the Sunset”).

  The researchers devoted two full days between July 24 and 26 to recording Muddy and the band, and returned again on July 30. The sessions yielded five solo takes of Muddy, ten others that featured him and some combination of the Son Sims Four, and one brief recorded Muddy interview. These sessions were recorded with high-grade ribbon microphones. They are quality field recordings that stand at a crossroads: Muddy is the intersection, old enough to have inherited the preblues, young enough to be involved in the creation of something new. Son Sims was a graduate of square dances, where the band played standards such as “Turkey in the Straw,” “Leather Britches,” and “Arkansas Traveler.” Muddy’s music, on the other hand, was imbued with passion and personality; in Muddy, the voice of individual expression was emerging.

  Exactly one week before Christmas of 1942, on a Friday, McKinley Morganfield returned to the county clerk’s office in Clarksdale and bought another marriage license. The signature line on his “Affidavit of Applicant” is distinguished by his X, around which Clerk J. N. Smith has written “his mark” and then spelled out “McKinley Morganfield.”

  After celebrating the engagement that weekend, Muddy, in a small ceremony on December 23, married Sallie Ann Adams, twenty-seven, formerly of Farrell (where she attended school through the sixth grade) and recently of Stovall, Mississippi. A light-skinned woman, “she wasn’t small and wasn’t large, just twixt and between,” said Magnolia Hunter, who worked on Stovall with Muddy. Sallie worked the field alongside Muddy and sometimes cooked hamburgers at the Stovall juke house while he played. He was twenty-nine years old, married again.

  “I Be’s Troubled” and “Country Blues” were included in a six-album package issued by the Library of Congress in January of 1943. His songs were in the album Afro-American Blues and Game Songs, alongside albums devoted to Anglo-Americ
an traditions, Bahamian songs, and recordings made of the Iroquois Indians. “This was the first time that a government had ever published its sort of unwashed authentic folksingers on records,” Lomax wrote in The Land Where the Blues Began. Indeed, this collection, issued when record companies still hid their participation in “race” music, was a harbinger of the societal desegregation to come.

  While Lomax was releasing these timeless songs rooted in tradition, pop radio was focusing on the issue of the day: World War II. America had entered the fray on December 8, 1941, and the home front rallied to hits such as Kay Kyser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and Johnny Mercer’s “GI Jive.” Colonel Stovall, who’d become a flying ace in the first war, reenlisted. His sons served in the Air Force too: William Howard Stovall IV was killed in action at the Battle of the Bulge. Plantations and farms, because they served the country with their crops, were able to protect some of their workers from the draft; Muddy, already in his late twenties and thus not prime pickings, had yet to be called up.

  On January 23, 1943, Muddy had someone sign his name to another form sent by Alan Lomax acknowledging receipt of two copies of “Record 18 in Album IV of Folk Music of the United States from Records in the Archive of American Folk Song (1942).” There was no mention of the payment, but Muddy remembered receiving a twenty-dollar check. “It would have taken me, well, how long to make twenty dollars if I worked five days for three dollars, seventy-five cents? That’s good money, twenty dollars. I was a big recording star.” He had no pictures made with either of his wives, but when his record arrived, he put on his best suit and carried it to a photographer’s studio, where he was photographed holding the love of his life. He put the other copy on the jukebox at Will McComb’s cafe, located nearby on Highway Number One between his house and Farrell. “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.’ ”

  Before the jukebox and way before blues radio, the way a person played a particular song could reveal the town or plantation where they’d learned it. Musical styles — indeed whole cultures — had been quarantined. Itinerant musicians, like birds dropping seeds, carried songs and styles; music was a communal experience shared through live performance, and techniques were exchanged through personal interaction. The popularization of recordings as a medium broadened the listener’s horizon of experience; standing before a jukebox, one could be exposed to twenty different artists and styles, and a week later, twenty more. (Recordings also etched a permanence to lyrics that had previously been mutable, introducing sticky issues of authorship.) Regionalistic traits began a slow melt into the national pool. As always, technology proved a mixed blessing. This was true when it came to music and when it came to the fields. The recent roar of the tractor had already killed off the field holler. Researching his doctoral thesis in Coahoma County in 1941, Fisk graduate student Samuel Adams found that

  On one occasion when an old cotton picker was asked whether or not the people sang as they worked, he laughed as he repeated the question to others. In fact he yelled it out across the field. They all seemed to be amused by the question. “Ain’t got no time for no singing,” he ended. Moreover, the influence of mechanization is to make man “not want to sing.” A young informant emphatically states: “There ain’t nothing about a tractor that makes a man want to sing. The thing keeps so much noise, and you so far away from the other folks. There ain’t a thing to do but sit up there and drive.”

  Muddy, too, was keenly aware of the machines. The mechanical cotton picker, long rumored in development, was being publicly tested for the first time just down the road from Stovall on the Hopson Plantation. The machine was ready to take the jobs of men and would be much more tolerant of the long hours and verbal abuse. Three years had passed since Muddy saw St. Louis. The billowing factories strong in his memory, he couldn’t help but see the tufts of smoke blown by the Delta’s newest device as evermore threatening.

  People went north not only because work was available, but also because work at home was diminishing. Northern industrial employment opportunities had increased with foreign munitions orders, and the employment pool had been drained by the demand for soldiers. The big city’s gravitational pull was strengthening. Robert Nighthawk had already left the Delta for Chicago, and his “Prowling Night-Hawk” had come out in 1937. Robert Lockwood’s “Black Spider Blues” came out in 1941. Tommy McClennan had been recording since 1939 and had a hit with “Bluebird Blues” in 1942. Muddy started 1943 with a twenty-dollar boost. He had records on a jukebox. Letters from his uncle Joe and cousin Dan spoke of the opportunities in Chicago. His first wife was making it up there.

  But the draw at Stovall remained powerful. When John Work returned in June of 1943 for further research, he heard Muddy perform at the Colonel’s home; perhaps one of the military men was home on a visit. “I remember them setting up the Japanese lanterns,” said Colonel Stovall’s son Bobby, “and the band setting up on the porch.” According to Bobby’s sister Marie Stovall Webster, “We used to hear the music from the honky-tonk in our house across from the gin on Saturday nights. And my grandmother played lots of Negro spirituals on the Victrola. My mother and father had grown up with Handy’s music, and my father [the Colonel] loved Mahalia Jackson. He did not look down on black music at all.”

  John Work spent much time with Muddy in 1943: “Muddy Water . . . explains that it is necessary to use two different repertoires to accommodate the demands of white and Negro dancers. The white dancers prefer tunes more akin to the old reels than to the blues, although the ‘St. Louis Blues’ is a great favorite among them. . . . For the colored dancers, Morganfield must play blues and music which stem from them, such as ‘Number Thirteen Highway’ and ‘I’m Goin’ Down Slow’ — his current favorite pieces. Muddy Water would like to join the church but to do so would mean to abandon his guitar — a sacrifice too dear to make.”

  But sacrifices were in Muddy’s future.

  In the absence of the Stovalls from their farm, the feel and conditions had changed. It was, anyway, a period of turmoil: the mules, which had driven the plantation since its inception, were being sold off and replaced by tractors; Captain Holt, the longtime overseer, quit or was fired by the recently hired plantation general manager, the trim, brown-haired Mr. T. O. Fulton. The man Fulton hired as a replacement, Ellis Rhett, “was kind of mean,” Stovall resident Manuel Jackson remembered, citing an instance where Rhett had whipped another field hand with a bridle. According to Bobby Stovall, “Mr. Rhett was the kind of guy that gave the South a bad name. There was a lot of old school about him. He was not user-friendly for black people.” (When Colonel Stovall returned in the summer of 1945 to an upset farm and unhappy tenants, he fired Fulton and Rhett immediately.)

  Muddy was making twenty-two and a half cents an hour for driving the tractor. “I was doing the same thing,” Muddy said, “his top men was doing for twenty-seven cents an hour.” One summer day in 1943, Muddy asked Rhett to raise him to a quarter. “[Rhett] says I’m the only man ever ask him for a raise,” Muddy said, “and if I don’t want to work for what I’m working for, get down off his tractor — leave it setting on the road, don’t take it to the barn, don’t take it to the shop. He came on like that three times, and when he was coming on, my mind was making up like this: Ain’t but one thing to do — he’d never like me no more and I’d never like him no more — kiss him good-bye.”

  According to the Reverend Myles Long, who was baling alfalfa hay with Muddy that day, “Muddy wasn’t too hard to get along with. We worked in the field together. That particular evening, we pulled under a shade tree to rest. I didn’t know what he [and Rhett] was fighting about, but I saw Muddy start to walking.”

  “Muddy got off,” said Jackson, “walked away from there, and I didn’t see him until he come back with his band from Chicago.”

  “His grandmother told him it was time to go,” Muddy’s last wife, Marva, remember
ed Muddy explaining. She knew how hard an overseer could make it on a field hand, and she worried for her grandson’s safety. Muddy’s friend Bo, who had recently been drafted, had one pair of good clothes that he wouldn’t need in the army; he gave them to Muddy for Chicago. Two days after the confrontation, Muddy caught an afternoon train carrying a suit of clothes and an acoustic Sears Silvertone guitar. He left Sallie Ann behind, again not bothering, apparently, with a divorce; she moved back to Farrell.

  Myles Long remembers Muddy reaching for a nail and scratching the hay baler before disappearing. He went to see what Muddy had done, and though it contradicts what is known about Muddy’s literacy, he is sure that he found scrawled there, whether addressed to his friend, or his former employer, or perhaps to the land all around him — the mother’s dust from whence he came — “God bless you.”

  Muddy Waters was gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  CITY BLUES

  1943–1946

  I was thinking to myself that I could do better in a big city,” Muddy recollected to writer and friend Pete Welding in 1970. “I thought I could make more money, and then I would have more opportunities to get into the big record field.”

  The only big city on Muddy’s mind was Chicago. Its presence in the Delta was long established. That which did not come from the ground or the furnish came from Chicago, usually through the catalogs of Sears and Montgomery Ward. Since 1916, the city’s black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, had been promoting what it called “The Great Northern Drive”: “Every black man for the sake of his wife and daughter should leave even at a financial sacrifice every spot in the South where his worth is not appreciated enough to give him the standing of a man and a citizen in the community. We know full well that this would almost mean a depopulation of that section and if it were possible we would glory in its accomplishment.” By 1930, the largest population of Mississippians outside the state was in Chicago. And as America’s entrance into World War II rekindled the industrial fires of the northern factories, the need for soldiers created a manpower crisis. Of the African Americans who went north in the first half of the century, nearly half migrated between 1940 and 1947. By the end of the forties, the median annual wage for blacks in Chicago was $1,919, while in the Magnolia state of Mississippi it was $439. Field hands took work on the assembly line at the Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Illinois, making money by making the machines that had taken their work.