“I went straight to Chicago, didn’t travel around at all,” said Muddy. “I went by train from Clarksdale to Memphis, changed in Memphis, and came up on the train they call Chicago Nine.” In 1940, Memphis to Chicago on the Illinois Central was a sixteen-hour trip costing eleven dollars and ten cents. If Muddy’s recording payment was socked away, he could have traveled north on it, with money left to spend.
Small towns dotted the line between Memphis and Chicago, the view from the train window mostly of farmland. The continuity of the landscape would reassure apprehensive travelers, the familiar topography soothing the first and most violent pangs of homesickness in people who were both nurtured and disciplined by the land.
But somewhere north of St. Louis, the look and feel of the towns changed, the churches becoming taller and narrower in design, with Germanic steeples and turrets. There was more money in these northern communities, and the wealth was reflected in the architecture. North of Cairo, Illinois, blacks would have moved forward on the train, exercising — many for the first time — their civil rights beyond Jim Crow’s grasp. A rolling plain feels different from a cleared jungle. And then over the earth’s curve, unfolding like a wide highway, was the capital of this new kingdom, the tall, storied buildings of Chicago. Chicago was a prairie town, spreading like pancake batter, widening along Lake Michigan, deepening in an endless absorption of farmland and ethnic settlements (reflected in the diversity of its modern urban checkerboard).
A porter at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago remembered the befuddlement he regularly witnessed: “If there was no one to meet [the arriving passengers], the newcomers seldom knew where to go. They might ask a Red Cap to direct them to the home of a friend — unaware that without an address the porter could be of little help in a city as large as Chicago. Or they might employ one of the professional guides who, for a fee, would help them find lodging. Some of the guides were honest, others were little more than confidence men. Travelers Aid and the railroad police tried to help the migrants and prevent exploitation; but for the newcomer without friends or relatives the first few days were often a terrifying experience.”
Greeted by the red glow of steel mills and the billowy, black, gritty smoke of factories working overtime, Muddy had moved from the world of the born to the world of the made.
“I had some people there [relatives],” Muddy recalled, “but I didn’t know where they was. I didn’t know nothing.” Leaving Stovall was the fulfillment of a dream so large he’d been almost unable to face it; he’d barely prepared. From the train station, he took a taxi, showing the driver the South Side address that had been burning a hole in his pocket, 3652 Calumet. He paid the driver to wait while he rang the bell. “I looked up a address of some boys that we’s raised up together and I came to their house and I stayed there. I got here on a Saturday, got a job working at [the Joanna Western Mills] paper factory, making containers. I was working Monday. Swing shift, three to eleven in the evening. Man, that’s the heaviest jive you ever saw in your life.” An arresting statement from a man long yoked to a cotton sack.
“Work there eight hours a day — I never did that before. My paycheck was forty-something bucks or fifty-something bucks a week. You got to be kiddin’, you know. Soon I put in some overtime, worked twelve hours a day and I brought a hundred and something bring-home pay. I said, ‘Goodgodamighty, look at the money I got.’ I have picked that cotton all the year, chop cotton all year, and I didn’t draw a hundred dollars.”
The heady times distracted him from the racial tensions underlying his bustling new home. Racism in Chicago was exacerbated by the competition for jobs between blacks and whites. Living conditions were cramped, Chicago’s South and West Sides bursting with southern black immigrants, many of whom were unprepared and ill-equipped to adapt to city life. Race riots were breaking out in other parts of the country, and Chicago’s Mayor “Big Ed” Kelly established a Committee on Race Relations. “During the last war we made a study after the riot,” commented one local African American politician. “This time let’s make the study before.”
The easy money eased Muddy’s transition, but music remained his focus. “I never did go get good jobs,” said Muddy. “I’d get them little old cheap jobs because I didn’t ever keep one too long. I got a job at the paper mill [loading] those forklift trucks, and then I got a little job workin’ for a firm that made parts for radios.” He also worked at a glass factory and as a truck driver, in addition to working the music scene at night. The clubs were active, but the recording studios were quiet. Muddy’s arrival coincided with a ban on all new recordings (August 1942 through November 1944) decreed by the president of the American Federation of Musicians, James Petrillo; Petrillo was trying to protect musicians who were losing live gigs to recordings.
Of course there was also the war to worry about and, still steamed, Stovall’s T. O. Fulton made sure that war caught up with Muddy quick. “Before I left,” Muddy recalled, “I go by Coahoma, tell this man at the [draft] board I got to go to Chicago to take care of a little business. You know they’s calling ’em into the army fast then. I say, ‘If you should need me in a couple of weeks, send the papers to Chicago.’ He gets on the phone, calls the manager at Stovall, and the manager says, ‘We done had this falling out,’ and bam, the papers was there. I don’t know what to do now. So this boy take me over to this little branch board up here and I told ’em my story and the man there say, ‘Don’t worry, you got a job?’
“ ‘Yeah, I’m working now,’ I tell him.
“ ‘Go on to your work,’ he says. ‘Don’t do nothing till you hear from us. Forget these papers.’ ”
Blues sounds in the early 1940s were still dominated by the Bluebird label, which had been releasing budget-priced 78s since 1933. Their roster had originally included such country blues artists as Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams, and Blind Willie McTell, but the sounds had become increasingly diluted.
“The blues Waters found on his arrival in Chicago was as well-turned and sophisticated as it often was empty of genuine emotion, and without the latter its guts were gone,” Pete Welding wrote. Welding was a music critic who founded Testament Records and, while living in Chicago in the 1960s and recording some of Muddy’s finest music, became a personal friend. “The vigorous, country-based blues that Chicago had refined, polished, and institutionalized since the 1920s, when the city had been established as the most influential blues recording center, had been progressively emasculated. . . . The once forceful, highly individualized blues had been diluted by large record firms to glossy, mechanistic self-parody and tasteless double entendre.” Muddy called it sweet jazz; the style has since come to be called hokum.
Bluebird was, at any rate, a marginal label. When Muddy arrived in 1943, Chicago was a jazz town. Nat “King” Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” was big; also Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers, and Billy Eckstine. “When Chicago was invaded [by southerners], there was nothing but swing music,” recalled Dave Myers, a pioneering electric bassist who came up from Mississippi in the 1930s. “Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the big bands. Swing was on the radio all the time, then [you hear] somebody playing records across the way and it’s all swing. My daddy played that old shoe stump, Mississippi stuff, and wasn’t nothing here relating to that at all.”
“People were going at that time for, I think you call it bebop,” said Muddy. “My blues still was the sad, old-time blues. You’d go in and tell [the club owners] you played blues, and a lot of them, they’d shake their head and say, ‘Sorry, can’t use you.’ ”
Some jazz clubs had a blues night — gigs that usually went to high-profile names familiar to Muddy through 78s and jukeboxes. Even those gigs weren’t great: according to union contracts, the pay for established names such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim was around ten dollars per person on a weekend night, or six dollars on a weeknight.
Without the clubs, the only venue open to Muddy was the house
party, a get-together in someone’s home where the drinks were cheaper, the food more plentiful, the audience nearer the band, and where the musicians could establish their reputations. He was on unfamiliar turf, but it was a hustle he knew. “I played mostly on weekends, but I have played seven nights a week, worked five days, sometimes six days. Plenty of food, whiskey, fried chicken, and they had bootleg whiskey. I was making five dollars a night playing. That was good side money for me.” He purchased a suit of new clothes. It was one thing to look country in Memphis; in Chicago, even the cheap clothes were fine.
After flopping with his friends, Muddy sought out his relatives. Chicago blacks were largely segregated into two sprawling ghettos: the West Side and, a half-rung up the social ladder, the South Side. Within these tight communities were organizations, such as the Clarksdale Citizens Association, that were built around the tight communities left behind. Through their network, Muddy may have located his cousin Dan Jones, to whose West Side apartment he moved within several weeks of his arrival. Muddy’s daughter Azelene and her mother, Leola Spain, lived nearby.
Not long after, he got his own place. Dan Jones Sr., whom he’d known on Stovall, had a large truck, which he hired out to landlords who needed apartments and houses cleaned out or moved. One of the job’s perks was scavenging appliances and furniture left behind. Another perk was the advance notice on upcoming vacancies, and when a real estate company had him clean out an apartment near his own, he slid Muddy right in. Four doors down from Jones, at 1851 West Thirteenth Street, second floor, Muddy faced north, enjoying a comfortable morning light and temperate afternoons. His rent was cheap; while his cousin paid thirty-five dollars a month, Muddy paid twelve, plus utilities, for four rooms. “Old Man Jones fixed Muddy up,” Jimmy Rogers said of Muddy’s cousin. “Muddy had furniture all through that house, bed and dressers, end tables, stove, refrigerator, a little radio, and a record player.”
By 1944, Muddy was meeting the established musicians, including Big Bill Broonzy. “I call my style country style,” said Muddy. “Big Bill was the daddy of country-style blues singers. When I got here, he was the top man.”
In a photograph from the 1940s, a proud young Muddy is shaking hands with Big Bill. Bill’s left arm is around Muddy’s shoulders, which slump as if unable to support the notion of Broonzy’s embrace. Muddy’s serious expression cannot hide his pleasure — it may be disbelief — at where he finds himself, and with whom. The folks back home, he seems to be thinking, will never believe it.
For decades, Big Bill’s character resonated with Muddy. “You done made hits, you got a big name, the little fellow ain’t nothing,” Muddy said in the 1970s about the star attitude. “But Big Bill, he don’t care where you from. He didn’t look over you ’cause he been on records a long time. ‘Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay with it, you going to make it.’ That’s what Big Bill told me. Mostly I try to be like him.”
One of the earliest, most important, and longest-lasting friendships Muddy Waters made when he came to Chicago was with fellow guitarist Jimmy Rogers. Rogers worked at Sonora Radio and Cabinet Company, where he had been befriended by Jesse Jones, Muddy’s cousin. Jesse and his brother Dan Jr. didn’t play music, but they liked to be around those who did. They admired Jimmy’s skill — his relaxed and smooth vocal style, his uncomplicated yet intricate guitar chording and strumming. Their friendship solidified when Jesse got Jimmy transferred to a less dangerous department of the factory. “He got me into that part where my hands wouldn’t get cut off.”
Both Muddy and Jimmy were from the Delta, each raised by his grandmother. Rogers, however, had a more nomadic youth. He was born James A. Lane in Ruleville, Mississippi, on June 3, 1924. Shortly after moving the family to his home state of Georgia, Jimmy’s father was killed in a scuffle among coworkers at a sawmill. Jimmy’s mother moved them back to the Delta, and Jimmy was taken in by his grandmother. They moved often, living in several towns in several states: Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
His first guitar was a diddley bow, common in the country — broom wire nailed to the side of a house and plucked. More portable than a wall, harmonicas were inexpensive and accessible, and Rogers switched to one, learning music basics on that before practicing on other people’s guitars. “My grandmother, she was a Christian-type woman, and man, they’s really against music, blues, period,” said Rogers. “After I got of age, my grandmother seen where she wasn’t gonna be able to stop me from trying to play, so she just give me up, said, ‘Well, okay, you can do what you want to as far as that’s concerned.’ ”
He was soon exposed to live musicians: Houston Stackhouse, Tommy McLennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White. “They was men then,” he said. “I was a youngster.” He too had grown up listening to Sonny Boy Williamson II. “I would rush home every day around twelve o’clock to hear him. I’d be digging every inch of his sounds.”
Rogers began to earn a reputation, appearing at house parties and playing for “small change, all the whiskey that I could drink, and maybe a dollar and a half cash money.” In Memphis, he befriended Robert Lockwood Jr. and Joe Willie Wilkins (“My favorite men, I played with them quite a bit, picked up some chords from them too.”) When his grandmother moved to St. Louis, Jimmy encountered Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis.
As he matured, Rogers felt the pull to move north. “I could feel [racism] at the age of ten,” he remembered. “I could see it going through my grandmother and my uncles and other people that were older. I could see what they were going through, and I understood what they be talking about. I didn’t like the South. I always said, ‘As soon as I get big, I’m gone.’ ”
Rogers had family in Chicago and had been there several times before settling permanently in the mid-1940s. Initially, he lived with his great-uncle, but soon found an apartment of his own on the Near West Side, next to the Maxwell Street Market, which is where he was living when his cousin Jesse brought Muddy by.
“We started talking and he said he played guitar,” said Rogers. “So one weekend, we got together and started jamming over at his house. I knew what I was listening for on guitar, and Muddy felt the same way. . . . I was playing with different musicians. They didn’t really know what I wanted. I would hum it to them, and I would phrase it on the guitar, run the notes on the harmonica — they still couldn’t get it. Then Muddy Waters, I listened to him and I said, ‘I know what he need.’ I’d just add sound — what he was singing, that’s the way I would play, and give him a feeling to it that he could really open up and come on out with it. It rang a bell.” Rogers didn’t play with a slide and didn’t need to. “I let Muddy do all that and I just harmonize it and play along, fill in for him and make a turnaround. He liked it that way.”
Rogers had amplified his acoustic guitar with a DeArmond pickup, which fit beneath the strings in the sound hole. “Muddy had a hollow S curve [model] like the Gene Autry guitar,” said Rogers, who played a Gibson L-5, “and I took him to Eighteenth and Halsted [The Chicago Music Company] and got him a DeArmond pickup put on his guitar, got him a little amplifier, and then you could get sound out of it.” The pure acoustic guitar was fine in rural Mississippi because there were no sounds at night but the shallow breathing of God at rest, and the steady percussion of crickets and cicadas. Not so in a Chicago of clanging streetcars, trains, and automobiles out late on a party. Muddy also began using a thumbpick, which further intensified his volume.
The two men continued to meet at Muddy’s apartment, about a ten-minute walk for Jimmy. “Wouldn’t be nobody home but us musicians,” Rogers said. “We come in, plug up the amp, get us one of these half-pint or pint bottles and get some ideas. We’d run through a few verses and move on to something else and keep on. Finally, after maybe three or four days fooling around, you’d be done built a number. On weekends, we’d buy a few drinks and play guitar. So we decided then we’d start this house-party deal over again here in Chicago.”
Another important and early friendship, though not
as long-lasting, was between Muddy and a guitarist named Claude Smith, better known as Blue Smitty. Smitty was born in Arkansas the same year as Jimmy Rogers, but began visiting Chicago when he was only four.
As he told it, Smitty’s guitar skills came “as a gift.” “One night it was raining,” he recalled. “It was summertime. A guy lived down the road from us and I got up at about one o’clock at night — everybody was asleep — and I walked down and asked him to let me use his guitar. He said, ‘What are you gonna do with the guitar this time of night?’ I said, ‘I’m gonna play it.’ And he let me have it, we wrapped it up to keep it from getting wet, and I went home and sat on the porch and started playing them six strings. And my mother get up and come to the door, she hear me out there: ‘When did you learn how to play the guitar?’ I said, ‘Tonight.’ And we sat up all night and listened to me play that guitar. I was about fourteen.”
In the mid-1940s, Smitty, about twenty, found work in Chicago as an electrician. Muddy met him through the gregarious Jesse Jones. At the time, his music was a mix of southern gutbucket blues and fancier finger work, blending the likes of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and jazz master Charlie Christian.
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