And hundreds of sounds. “I heard this harmonica one Sunday morning — woke me up!” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “I put my clothes on, went down in the crowd on Maxwell Street.
“I was familiar with Little Walter’s sound, I had met him in Helena, Arkansas, when he was just a kid. I went on down to the street and there he was! Little squirrel-faced boy.” Walter’s sound had an acrobatic litheness to it, a humor to its swing. He listened to Louis Jordan’s small combo, jump and jive records. “It was amazing,” recalled Rogers, “this youngster was blowing harp and that was my instrument. He had a bass player, a guitar, and a drum playing with him, but the only thing that was really standing out to me was the harmonica. I sat in with them and we had a wonderful time. That’s the way we really met, communicating.”
Walter was a cat what liked a hat. Crisp suits, snappy shirts, he dressed like cash money, or the lack thereof: one day chicken, the next day feathers. A slight, attractive young man, Walter Jacobs had a sharp face and red-complected skin, a hint of Native American blood. He kept his wavy hair short and combed off his face. His eyes were dark and penetrating. “Walter was wild,” said Rogers. “Walter was likely to kill you or anybody that crossed him. A young buck with a lot of temper. He had more nerve than brains. He’d fuck up — and we’d have to get him out of jail, me and Muddy.”
Under the tutelage of Muddy and Jimmy, Little Walter would develop into a harmonica player whose influence would rank alongside the two Sonny Boys. Born Marion Walter Jacobs in Alexandria, Louisiana, May 1, 1930 (or perhaps Marksville, Louisiana, May 2, 1931), he heard the cry of a lonesome harmonica in the big open sky, and at the age of eight (or twelve), set out to answer its calling. “What really made me choose [harmonica] was that most of the kids, my mother too, tried to dissuade me from playin’ it. Of course that made me more int’rested and the more they tried to disgust me with it, the more I caught on. If you give up, you lose the fight.” He hopped trains, followed harvests and parties. In Monroe, Louisiana, he was a regular at the Liberty Night Club in 1943, eventually working his way to Helena, where — when not hounding Sonny Boy Williamson II for technique — he was sleeping on pool tables. In Helena, he also spent time with the influential guitarists Houston Stackhouse and Robert Lockwood Jr., picking up guitar basics. Then it was New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis — “playing,” he said, “around a few shoeshine stands, pool rooms, you know.”
When he got to Chicago, the teenaged Walter took a room at Newberry and Fourteenth, about two blocks from Jimmy Rogers. “I told Muddy I met a boy down in Jewtown that could really blow,” said Rogers. He walked Walter the mile west to Muddy’s house. “We had our guitars and started banging away and we could see he’d fit in. Muddy and I could hear a different type harmony on guitar, but we couldn’t find anyone else who could play that way. So I just give Walter the privilege to play harmonica and I turned completely to guitar.”
“When I met him he wasn’t drinking nothing but Pepsi-Cola,” said Muddy. “Just a kid. And I’ll tell you, I had the best harmonica player in the business, man. He didn’t have very good time, but me and Jimmy teached him that. Plus we taught him how to settle down. He was wild, he had to play fast! He was always a jump boy, had that up ’n go power. His mind was so fast he could think twice to your once, that’s how he learned to harp so good.”
Rogers added about Walter, “Really the big problem was getting him to settle down enough to play. He’d get executing and go on. He was worse than the Bird, Charlie Parker. I would say, ‘Look, I don’t care how far you range on the wall, just meet me at the corner.’ ” So, the past met the future and enjoyed the company. Muddy: stolid, composed, authoritative — rooted in the dust of Mississippi. Walter: half his age and galloping on Louisiana swamp funk and Kansas City swing. There to mediate the distance: Jimmy Rogers.
The three were further propelled by Baby Face Leroy’s Saturday-night frolic drumming. “There were four of us,” Muddy said, “and that’s when we began hitting heavy.” Jimmy Rogers stated flatly, “Me and Muddy and Walter with a drum, we could sell just about anything.”
The group continued to meet at Muddy’s house for rehearsal. “There wouldn’t be nobody there to give you no problem,” said Rogers. “So we would suck on these little half-pints, and Muddy would cook some rice and chicken gizzards. We’d have a pot on in the kitchen and we’d get us a bowl, get us some water and get a little drink, then we’d sit back down and do it some more.”
Muddy would bring in a song idea, lyrics that suggested a rhythm. Many songs were variations on established ones that each player would have learned differently — in different counties in the Delta. “We’d find a pattern that fit what he’s saying,” said Jimmy, “and then I’d build and Walter would fall in, find him a pocket. Then we’d run them patterns. It’s like pushing a car — once you get it started rolling, you can’t stop.”
The car found a garage when the Zanzibar club opened in 1946 at the corner of Ashland and Thirteenth, half a block from Muddy’s apartment. Muddy began stopping there for half-pints, and he befriended the proprietor, Hy Marzen. “Muddy lived in the neighborhood where our store was at,” Marzen said. “He was almost like a bum off the street, just getting started.” The Zanzibar was nicer than a hole-in-the-wall, but not much larger. The bandstand was in the back, a semicircular bar was in the middle, and at the front was a counter for delicatessen and liquor. “We sold corned-beef sandwiches by the ton, hard-boiled eggs, hot dogs, pigs feet, cole slaw. And I had two jeeps running up and down the street making deliveries,” Marzen continued. The club became a home base for Muddy’s band until it closed, eight years later, in 1954. “I used to make out the checks to McKinley Morganfield. I paid him a hundred dollars weekly, plus drinks, and he paid the others.”
At the Zanzibar, the band gelled, and it was as exciting for them as for the audience. Marzen had to post an off-duty cop near the bandstand “to make sure people behaved themselves.” The band played sitting down, and the audience, especially as the night progressed, liked to stand up. “The clubs were very violent,” said Rogers. “After we got into bigger clubs they’d fight, or some guy would get mad with his old lady and they’d fight. Somebody would get cut or get shot. Clubs had two o’clock regular license, and if you wanted to stay open till three, you would pay extra, a patrol buy. That was a little gimmick the gangsters had going.”
“I’d go up there with him to the Zanzibar,” said bluesman R. L. Burnside, Muddy’s girlfriend’s cousin. “The sound was great. Electric. Big sound, good sound. It was unusual to see someone on electric then. I learned a lot of stuff just watching him.”
Others were studying the band too, and even before they established their reknown at the Zanzibar, people began to know Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter by name, by sound, and by reputation. “We used to go around calling ourselves the Headhunters,” said Muddy. “We’d go from club to club looking for bands that are playing and cut their heads [engage in a musical duel]. ‘Here come them boys,’ they’d say.”
“We used to just do it for kicks,” said Jimmy Rogers, “to keep from sitting around at home. As soon as we would get in a place, somebody would want us to play. We would go to the car and maybe get an amp and quick bring it in there and set up and jam a few numbers. We could take the gig if we wanted it, but it wasn’t paying nothing, so we just drink and have some fun. That would mean a bigger crowd for us on the places that we were playing on weekends, because we’d announce where we were. Free publicity. By the time the taverns closed at two, we maybe done hit four or five, maybe six different taverns, and we had a pocket of money, maybe fifteen, twenty dollars apiece. And other bands, they would be glad for us to come around, because they were trying to get into the beat that we had.” Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter plugged in, and musicians threw down their instruments, not to flee but as an invitation, anxious to witness the sound of the future up close, to feel the jolt of their industrial power. Muddy Waters was creating the blues anew.
; The Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil, were not African American and were not from the South. But they were, like Muddy, like Jimmy Rogers, and like many of the artists they would make stars on their record label, immigrants to Chicago, angling for a foothold in this urban new world.
Jewish and from Poland, the brothers arrived with their mother in New York on Columbus Day, 1928. They quickly boarded a train to join their father, Joseph, who had settled in Chicago several years earlier and was beginning to realize the better life for which he’d crossed an ocean. At first, booze was their business. They bought increasingly larger liquor stores, graduating to a nightclub.
Chicago, liquor, and nightclubs have a long history together, and if the Chess brothers were no Al Capones, they shared his instinct for creating a large organization from a small business. “Their club, the Macomba, was small,” said drummer Freddie Crutchfield, who occasionally performed there with Tom Archia’s house band. “It had the booths on one side and the bar on the other. It was narrow and long, but it was a beautiful joint.” It was in a musical neighborhood, near places such as the Green Gable Hotel, where Lionel Hampton might visit.
The brothers soon deduced that the Macomba’s patrons might want to take the nightclub music home with them. Through a friend who owned Universal Recording Studios, the Chesses learned of a fledgling label that was seeking investors. They bought in. “Aristocrat [Records] was doing all white stuff then,” recalled Phil Chess, the younger brother, “ ‘Get On the Ball, Paul’ kind of stuff, by a bunch of groups I never heard of. But they were selling a little bit around Chicago. And we had the black bands playing at our club, and we thought we’d take a shot and record one of those groups. That’s how we got into the business.” The business was nascent at the time, and Leonard’s intimate familiarity with the South Side was essential to his success. He was entering the business, he later recalled, when “every porter, Pullman conductor, beauty and barbershop was selling records.”
One afternoon at the musician’s union hall, Aristocrat’s recently hired African American talent scout, Sammy Goldberg, ran into Muddy and asked to hear him play. “[Leonard] had Goldstein [sic], a black guy, scouting for him,” said Muddy, “and he wanted to hear me play a piece. I didn’t have no guitar with me, and Lonnie Johnson was there with his. Lonnie said, ‘No, man, I don’t loan my guitar to nobody.’ The man said, ‘Let the man play one piece on the guitar. What he gonna do to it? He can’t eat it.’ ” What Goldberg heard confirmed the rumors of Muddy’s talent.
Muddy was not home the autumn day of 1947 to receive the call that changed his career. He was at his day job, in his delivery truck, as unaware of the encounter ahead as he had been of Alan Lomax’s arrival. Muddy was driving for the Westerngrade Venetian Blinds Company. “He’d deliver them, then he’d go home, play around, then go back to the factory,” said Jimmy Rogers. “You’d see that doggone truck sitting in front of Muddy’s place a lot of the time. He’d be in there eating or something. He had a good gig like that.” Annie Mae had by then found her own place, and Muddy’s childhood friend Bo, back from serving Uncle Sam, moved into the second bedroom, helping Muddy with the rent.
The invitation to record for Leonard Chess came from piano player Sunnyland Slim, who had talked himself onto an Aristocrat session in the last quarter of 1947. Sunnyland, never one to miss a gig and a catalyst for many artists of Muddy’s generation, knew that Leonard was trying to get the label going, and rumors of another musician’s union ban on recording were forcing label owners to stockpile material. Leonard, having cut a full band, was interested in trying a smaller group, where the complications were fewer, the studio time more cost-efficient, and the results — two songs on a ten-inch 78 RPM record — about the same. Lightnin’ Hopkins was hot at the time, John Lee Hooker. Sunnyland, who’d been gigging with Muddy, told Leonard he had just the man for this new sound. Goldberg, Leonard’s scout, was at the studio and verified this new artist’s talent. Sunny phoned Muddy, who was out on the truck. Leonard told Sunny, “Hell man, go get him,” and Goldberg told Sunny, “Find him today, find him today.”
Sunny again called Muddy’s house and, with Muddy’s roommate Bo, devised a scheme. Bo phoned the Westerngrade office and left a message for McKinley Morganfield — “Mac” to his coworkers — that his mother was sick, please come home. His mother being long dead, Muddy knew something was up. Sunnyland, in the meantime, hopped a bus over to the West Side. When Muddy got home, Sunny was there, jumpy most likely, as valuable session time was ticking by, which is what he explained to Muddy. “Bang!” said Jimmy Rogers. “That was right up Muddy’s alley.” They drove Muddy’s car back to the session.
As for money, the job at Westerngrade Venetian Blinds would have paid better. As for records, Muddy would soon make better. But for historic moments, this session was mighty, inaugurating a twenty-eight-year relationship between Muddy Waters and the Chess brothers.
“Two or three days after the session, Muddy told me he done made a tape for Chess,” said Jimmy Rogers. “Muddy said, ‘Man, I don’t know how it’s gonna sound but I got my foot in the door, I think.’ Finally we got a hold of a disc of it, and we played it.” Rogers was surprised by the emptiness of what he heard. All their work at building a band sound had been dismissed in favor of Leonard’s misguided attempt to recreate country blues. The session had not involved Muddy’s regular band; Ernest “Big” Crawford, a bassist, was there to record with Andrew Tibbs, and Sunnyland had grabbed him and a drummer to back up Muddy. But it was more than that. Leonard wanted a country blues hit, but he didn’t understand country blues. Piano players were what taverns hired; Leonard simply couldn’t grasp the guitar as a lead instrument. So when Muddy’s “Little Anna Mae” should rip into a guitar solo, the piano takes the lead. Muddy’s talents were again thwarted.
Sunnyland’s sides were released (“Sunny Land Slim with Muddy Water”), but Leonard shelved Muddy’s for several agonizing months. When “Gypsy Woman” and “Little Anna Mae” were finally released in February of 1948, they didn’t set Chicago afire, but there was interest.
Muddy had to wait until April of 1948 for his next invitation to the studio. Despite yet another ban called by James Petrillo, the independent labels continued to work, staking a claim to the blues market. Still Leonard continued moving in the wrong direction, resisting Muddy’s efforts to bring in his band. Clinging to his own partialities, Leonard introduced a saxophone to the lineup. As a result, “Good Lookin’ Woman” and “Mean Disposition” also ended up on a shelf, unreleased during Muddy’s lifetime.
After Muddy, Sunnyland cut two with the same combo. When the session was finished — Leonard’s way — Muddy could contain himself no longer. “I said, let me do one,” recounted Muddy, “by myself.” And Muddy started in on his material, playing his Delta blues on an electric guitar. His choice was a sure thing, a song with an undeniable bounce that had worked on Alan Lomax, was working in the Chicago clubs, and like eyesight to the blind, should have worked on Leonard Chess: “I Can’t Be Satisfied.”
The sound was not the full urban blues of Muddy’s band, but the amplifier did sustain longer than an acoustic guitar — the notes hung in the air like Delta humidity, and there was a ferociousness to the full chord. Big Crawford thumped out a doghouse sound on his upright bass, bolstering the rhythm. “He was laughing at me,” remembered Muddy. “Said, ‘This is my type of stuff.’ ” The bottleneck slide sang of the South, the electric instrument rang of the North. Leonard asked aloud, “What the hell is he singing?”
He still couldn’t hear it.
“Leonard Chess, he didn’t know what it was,” said Muddy of his boldly amplified country blues. “He didn’t like my style of singing. The woman that was his partner, Evelyn Aron, she dug me.” Muddy, ever the ladies’ man.
Aristocrat 1305 — Muddy Waters with Rythm (sic) Accompaniment, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” / “I Feel Like Going Home” — was released early on an April weekend in 1948. These are the same two songs
he recorded for the 1941 Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study. Perhaps not surprisingly, though the notes are nearly the same (yet so much richer), the feel — and the lyrics — are different. He’s no longer singing behind a mule or beneath an open sky; he’s a factory worker whose vision of God behind the stars is narrowed by a maze of buildings. He picks notes, but with the strength of one fighting an unyielding metal machine, and when he strikes chords, it’s with force enough to fell a streetcar. “Country Blues” has become “I Feel Like Going Home,” a mishearing of the double entendre “feel like blowing my horn,” though similar in its yearning for comfort and companionship. The verse about “leaving this morning if I have to ride the blinds” has been dropped; Muddy and his audience have ridden those blinds.
Released on a Friday, the first pressing was nearly gone by Saturday night. The first Petrillo ban was like a flood that swept that insincere chiffon world clean, and Muddy, a blues Noah, cultivated a music devoted to emotion, feeling, truth. “You couldn’t get one in Chicago nowhere,” said Muddy. “The people were buyin’ two or three at a time. They started a limit, one to a customer.” Stores jacked up the prices, the seventy-nine-cent record soon selling for more than a dollar. At the Maxwell Street Radio Company, Muddy exclaimed, “But I’m the man who made it.” He left with a single copy.
The record caught the ear of Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade paper. Though their reviewer didn’t care for it (“Poor recording distorts vocal and steel guitar backing”), it rose to number eleven on their Most-Played Jukebox Race Records chart. And though Muddy found the music “empty” without his band, the popularity of the record made it easy to like. “Muddy was playing when I was plowing,” B. B. King remembered, “mules that is. When I first heard of Muddy Waters, I had never left Mississippi. Then finally we started to get records on him — ‘I Feel Like Going Home.’ He had something that no one else had, and I loved to hear him play.”
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