“I went down in Jewtown to buy some guitar strings,” said Smitty, referring, like Greektown, to the colloquial name of the immigrant market neighborhood on the Near West Side. “It started raining and we were standing under the canopy. This one guy was going in the music store and he asked me if I would hold his guitar. He had five strings on the guitar and I just started playing it. This fellow was standing next to me, he said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Sure I can play.’ He said, ‘I got somebody I’d like for you to meet. Then maybe you can teach him something.’ I said, ‘Who is that?’ He said, ‘His name is McKinley Morganfield, he’s my cousin, but they call him Muddy Waters.’ ”
Smitty went to Muddy’s apartment. “Muddy was sitting down in the middle of the floor and he had the pickup out of his guitar, and he was trying to fix it,” Smitty recalled. “The ground wire had come a-loose, it needed soldering. So I soldered the wire in his pickup and put it back in the guitar. Muddy played first. He had a cheap little amplifier there, but it sounded pretty good. He said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play.’ ” They were like an eager couple on a first date. Muddy handed Smitty his guitar, and Smitty retuned it from the Spanish to standard tuning. Smitty remembered Muddy saying, “I don’t know anything about that other tuning, I play with slide all the time.”
Motivated by Muddy, Smitty found steady work, buying a Gibson amplifier and then his own DeArmond pickup. “So Muddy and I started practicing together. I tried getting him away from that slide, ’cause I could play single-note picking. And I would teach him how to play the bass to what I was playing. He always had a good sense of timing. And from then on, every week, sometimes four or five times a week, in the evenings, we’d get together.”
Himself inspired, Muddy began taking two guitars to house parties, one tuned to standard for picking, and one tuned to Spanish (open G) for sliding. “He really learnt me some things on the guitar, too,” confirmed Muddy. “I played mostly bottleneck until I met Smitty. It was a very, very good improvement he did for me, because I didn’t have to try to do everything with the slide by itself.”
The world of South Side blues was small. Smitty and Jimmy Rogers had already been performing together — with Jimmy on harmonica, a piano player called King, and a drummer known as Pork Chop. “I was playing with Smitty and I got a few ideas from him,” said Rogers. “When Muddy came to Chicago, we started hanging around together, him and Smitty and myself.”
Smitty was cursed, however, with a good day job. Unlike Muddy and Jimmy, he wasn’t stone committed to music, and though he was a natural talent, he often wouldn’t show up. “If Blue Smitty wasn’t there,” said Rogers. “I’d have to play the guitar. If he was, I’d play harmonica.” Drummers were scarce. The country blues had never demanded one — a guitarist stomping the wood floor resonated well enough. In Chicago, the paying gigs were jazz, and no blues drummers had developed. So the second guitarist would loosen his strings to play bass parts and keep rhythm.
Calvin Jones, who later joined Muddy’s band as a bassist, stumbled onto the newcomer at a small nightspot a few blocks from Muddy’s apartment. “I went to a skin game [cards], gambling in someone’s apartment, and I heard this guitar, he had his slide going. So I went to the window and he was right across the street. I left the game and went down there. He had a harmonica player with him. It was an acoustic guitar what Muddy had. It was a weeknight, they didn’t even have a bandstand, they were just sitting in their chairs playing. Wasn’t nobody in the joint, three peoples maybe. I asked him what his name was. ‘Muddy Waters.’ He said it real cool.”
“We’d call it scabbing,” said Rogers. “You hit here, you set up with asking this guy that owns the club if he wouldn’t mind you playing a few numbers — quite naturally it was good for his business, he would say okay. You’d play a number or two, they’d like it, you’d pick up a buck here, a buck there.”
Before long Blue Smitty managed to land the band a proper club gig. “So one day I was going to get a haircut” — Smitty’s career-changing stories have the most prosaic of beginnings — “and while I was in this barber shop at the corner of Ogden and Twelfth, this one guy said to me, ‘While you’re waiting, play us a piece or two.’ ” Smitty did, and the guy told him, “I’d like to have some guys that can play as good as you, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. What are you gonna charge me for playing?” Smitty reported back to Muddy and the trio was hired for five dollars apiece per night. The response was good; they added Thursdays.
As his fan base grew, Muddy must have heard time and again, “Hey, you’re pretty good, you ever record for anybody?” That none of his peers had heard of the Library of Congress probably slowed him not at all from pulling out a copy of his record, maybe wrapped in cloth so it wouldn’t break, his name typed on the label, visible if you squinted because he’d worn it out playing and showing it off. Hell yes he’d recorded.
And while his fellow rural city dwellers had found little kinship in the jaunty, unemotional, ragtimey sounds that predominated, they loved music that evoked the sawdust on a juke-joint floor, the dust that the mule plow kicked up, the emptiness of a lonely country road. Muddy had never aspired to play with urban flash, basking instead in the slow country blues feel, keeping it as his foundation even as he modernized it. It was Muddy’s own deal with the devil: he left his native community but gained a larger one, a wealthier one that could purchase the nostalgia and authenticity of his music.
Much of that modernization came via a new instrument. The electric guitar was the Delta bluesman’s answer to the mechanical cotton picker. “We were playing our little clubs and a ‘cue-stick’ [acoustic] guitar wouldn’t answer there, not in a liquor club,” recalled Muddy. “My uncle Joe [Grant] had been in Chicago a long time and everybody played those electric guitars. He told me I ought to play one, and he bought me one. It wasn’t no name-brand electric guitar, but it was a built-in electric guitar, not a pickup just stuck on. It gave me so much trouble that that’s probably why I forgot the name. Every time I looked around I had to have it fixed. Finally it got stoled from me in one of them little neighborhood clubs, and the next one I got me was a Gretsch, and that’s the one I used on all my early hits.” The DeArmond had allowed for a longer sustain in the notes, but the electric guitar was a whole new beast. It affected the approach to singing and the role of the other instruments. With it — and in particular with Muddy taking it on — the Chicago blues, the urban blues, the modern blues, were nascent.
“It was a very different sound, not just louder,” said Muddy. “I thought that I’d come to like it — if I could ever learn to play it.” The difference was not in the music Muddy created, but in how he created it — how his fingers attacked the string, how his slide worked the neck. “That loud sound would tell everything you were doing,” he explained. “On acoustic you could mess up a lot of stuff and no one would know that you’d ever missed.”
The sound was heavy, especially when all three guitars played together, intertwined and forceful — Muddy sliding, Jimmy laying patterns under him, and Smitty punching up the bass parts. Each could trade off roles (except for the slide), and their vocal styles were varied. And strangely, wonderfully, behind the closed walls of a club in the later hours of the evening, at the end of a long day, a heartless day, an exhilarating day, a calm resembling quiet could settle on the city and the electrified sound could evoke a downright backcountry night.
Eddie Boyd, kin to Muddy and raised near Stovall, had come to Chicago in 1941, and he played a sleek, smoother style. “He wanted me to play like Johnny Moore,” said Muddy, “which I wasn’t able to play the guitar like. He wanted it to be a kind of sweet blues.” With Eddie’s guidance, Muddy and Smitty joined Local 208, the “Negro” chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, and fell into a good gig. “Jimmy Rogers, he was having girl trouble during that time, so some way or the other he got out of the band,” remembered Smitty. He and Muddy began playing with Boyd. A sign went up at the Flame Club: B
LUES, BLUES, AND MORE BLUES. When Boyd took another gig in nearby Gary, Indiana, Muddy and Smitty got Sunnyland Slim, another popular pianist, to replace him. That trio left the Flame and went to the Purple Cat on Madison.
Jimmy Rogers got his act together about the time Blue Smitty was losing his, so Muddy never lacked accompaniment for house parties and small clubs. Nor did he lack accompaniment in his apartment. In the mid-1940s, Muddy was shacking up with Annie Mae Anderson, whom he’d known at Stovall. “Nice-looking girl,” said Elve Morganfield. “At Stovall, she was married to Sam Anderson. Like I said, Muddy was a Casanova, he was happy-go-lucky. He had ’em all. He loved them young women, oh yeah.”
In Chicago, Muddy was becoming his own man. His grandmother died in 1946, and home may never have seemed more distant. He was a beneficiary on her insurance, quickly spending the money on a luxury he’d grown accustomed to in Mississippi. “He got his paycheck and with that other little money he inherited he paid the down payment on the car,” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “It was a rust-colored Chevy, nineteen forty two-door. Musicians, blues players, didn’t have cars too much then, and that’s what really started him into going around.” John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson began hiring Muddy for gigs in Gary, Indiana, and other distant places.
Sonny Boy’s skills on the harmonica thrust the instrument from back pockets to center stage. He had a good-time bomp bomp abomp bomp sound. “If you liked blues, you liked his,” said Muddy. “He had that particular little twinkle in the voice that got to people.” One name for the harmonica is “mouth organ,” and his mastery on the twenty-five-cent novelty item brought it to a level of respect shared by the piano. When notes were held, the harmonica could lay a foundation not unlike a keyboard, but the instrument really shined when riffs punctuated or bolstered lyrics. “Mississippi saxophone” was another name, and blues bands made it the poor man’s horn section. Sonny Boy developed a choking style, not squeezing the life out of the harmonica, but bellowing his life’s breath into it. The bends and slurs — making the instrument say “wah wah” — gave it personality. A song such as “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” could have both a sense of humor and an undercurrent of terror, all built around a hook that made it wildly popular.
Sonny Boy drank on his gigs and couldn’t keep a band together. “Eddie Boyd and myself and Sonny Boy was playing together,” Muddy said. “Sonny Boy was mostly doing all the singing and they wanted to keep me in the background. But Sonny Boy’d keep a-gettin’ high, we got to try to carry it on. So one night Eddie done got tired of singing all night, and Sonny Boy got drunk — Eddie know I could sing ’cause we raised together — Eddie said, ‘Why don’t you sing one?’ I could see he was sung out. I pulled the mike to me, opened this big mouth up, boy, and the house went crazy, man. I sang one of [Lowell] Fulsom’s songs, ‘Trouble.’ ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble, all in this world I see.’ And I was talkin’ quietly to the people, quietly, and they went nuts. And Sonny Boy heard that noise goin’ on, he jumped up, grabbed that harp and taken that mike. ‘My baby left me, left me a mule to ride.’ ” Muddy laughed. “He seen how I brought down the house. We worked around quite a little bit together, till Sonny Boy got drunk and got us fired. Sonny Boy wouldn’t do right. He had that big name too, all them big records out, but he loved whiskey better than he did his work, man.”
They stayed friendly until June 1, 1948. While walking home from a gig, Sonny Boy was robbed. His assailant, never identified, took his wallet, his watch, three harmonicas, and most of his life. Despite intercranial hemorrhaging, Sonny Boy crawled the last block home to his doorstep, where his wife found him — and presumed him drunk. Three hours later he was dead.
By now, the Petrillo ban on recording had been lifted, and the recording industry had awakened to a new and different scene. Talent scouts once again scurried from club to club, but instead of the smooth, sappy music from between the wars, they found another new sound had taken root in the raucous clubs. New artists had reinvigorated old ideas, and new record labels were springing up to give them a shot. After three years of trying, Muddy’s devotion to music, to the late nights playing to spilled beer, the next day’s ache at his day job — paid off in 1946 with his first two commercial sessions. Muddy’s first session was for an independent producer; the second had him in the ranks of the major labels.
From the first, only one track was issued. “Mean Red Spider,” produced by J. Mayo Williams, the pioneering African American independent producer, was more representative of the existing Chicago sound than of the new developments Muddy was forging. He sings lead, but his guitar is buried beneath a squealing clarinet, a busy saxophone, and a ragtimey piano. The presence of these reed instruments reflects the influence of the big-band sound; the fact that there’s only two and not a whole section indicates the style’s diminishing sway.
“I remember that session,” said Muddy. “Somewhere here in Chicago we did it. We got half sideman [half the union-scale sideman’s rates]. We didn’t get forty-one twenty-five. Forty-one twenty-five was sidemen’s then, eighty-two fifty was the leader. I musta got twenty-something dollars out of it.”
Muddy’s name isn’t even on the record. “Mean Red Spider” was attributed to James “Sweet Lucy” Carter and His Orchestra. Mr. Carter may be featured on the A-side (“Let Me Be Your Coal Man”), but he’s nowhere on Muddy’s track. “James Carter, I don’t know,” said Muddy, looking at the label copy brought to him in the 1970s by blues researcher Jim O’Neal, who was confirming what sounded like Muddy’s presence. “But that is me. I got a little guitar in there somewhere, I hear it every once in a while. I thought that record was drownded in the river.”
Through acquaintances made at that session, Muddy was introduced to “Baby Face” Leroy Foster, a skinny, smiling guy who’d hit Chicago from the South earlier that year. Foster was a skilled guitarist who also had a knack for drumming, and unlike the jazz players, he shared the juke-house aggressiveness that Muddy and Jimmy were putting into electric blues. With drums, the group landed a gig on Roosevelt Road and their following continued to build. Baby Face switched between guitar and drums, Jimmy could pull out his harmonica, or all three could play guitars and sing. “When we discovered what was going down,” Muddy remembered, “then I said, ‘Wow, man! We got something here!’ ”
This boost in popularity brought him to the attention of producer Lester Melrose, who was responsible for “the Bluebird sound,” the chiffon blues — what Muddy called sweet jazz — that was waning in popularity. Melrose, a white Illinoisian in his fifties when Muddy arrived, had been the dominating force on the blues recording scene for the past decade and a half. He was responsible for much of the roster at both major blues labels, RCA (which controlled Bluebird) and Columbia.
On Friday, September 27, 1946, Muddy cut eight tracks for Columbia Records under Melrose’s supervision. Muddy was leader on three tracks, backed vocalist Homer Harris on three, and backed pianist Jimmy Clark on two. There are no horns on any tracks. The arrangements, with piano, drums, and bass, might have seemed crowded in a Mississippi juke joint, but they were positively spare for Chicago. Booking three heavy-throated, unknown vocalists, Melrose was clearly looking for the next big thing. Stylistically, he was on target — Muddy’s vocals would be imitated by a generation — but Melrose’s roots in sweet blues bog these tracks in the past. In his introductions, Muddy almost pushes the sound into the future: his guitar is prominent and hitting heavy, but when a second guitar should kick in, it’s instead the piano, sounding like yesterday and miked to play lead.
Muddy exhibits great confidence in his playing. His amplifier is turned up and, when appropriate, he lets the distortion rip. On Harris’s topical “Atomic Bomb Blues,” Muddy and pianist James Clark trade the hammered triplets that would become a feature of Muddy’s later band. Cognizant of Melrose’s sophisticated tastes, Muddy kept his slide in his pocket. “That country stuff might sound funny to ’em,” he later remembered thinking. His phrasing, nonethel
ess, is imbued with a Delta feel; Muddy has Mississippi at his core. He also has Chicago at his fingertips; his comfort with the piano indicates that, through regular scabbing, he and his cronies had become accustomed to larger lineups.
As fall turned to winter and 1946 became history, Muddy watched these sessions sit neglected on Lester Melrose’s shelf. The Jimmy Clark tracks came out (“Blues singer with piano, string bass, drums, and guitar,” with no names given on the label), but Muddy’s, along with those of Homer Harris, remained vaulted for almost a quarter century.
“You gotta have something that the record company wants,” said Muddy. “And sometimes they are afraid to take a chance. They got a good blues seller, don’t have to make another blues singer. People interested in people selling. You runs a store and you carrying brand-new merchandise, you don’t know whether it’ll sell or not. And they wasn’t takin’ a chance on mine.”
CHAPTER 6
ROLLIN’ AND TUMBLIN’
1947–1950
Music was always in the air at the Maxwell Street Market on the Near West Side. The Market, the heart of Jewtown, ran about eight blocks and at least a block deep on either side. Behind the narrow doors and large display windows were stores of all types — dry goods, fresh produce, meats and fish, textiles and garments, jewelers and barbers, pharmacies, pawn shops. The back rooms of many shops were devoted to card games or dice, some for the entertainment of the proprietors and others for the bamboozlement of the patrons. Outside there were shambling carts selling secondhand goods and junk, the useless items commingled with the useful. The scene was similar at Handy Park on Memphis’s Beale Street, but, like everything in Chicago, it was on a much larger scale.
Musicians would set up all along the stretch, some competing on corners, some seeking quiet on a midblock stoop, a hat or a carton or a lousy paper bag laid before them, banging a box and singing ham-bone for change. “Jewtown, on Saturdays and Sundays from around eleven o’clock to about five in the evening,” said Jimmy Rogers, who lived just off Maxwell, “you could make more money with three or four guys than you could make in a club in the whole week. Man, there’d be hundreds of people around.”
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