Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  Others loved to hear Muddy too. “Then Chess began to come close to me, because Andrew Tibbs [Chess’s bet] had done failed,” said Muddy. “ ‘Come down and let’s have coffee together.’ ‘I don’t drink coffee.’ ‘We’ll get a sandwich. Come on down to the office.’ Yeah, he was my buddy, but I was glad, man. Hey, I had worked all my life to get my name up there. He did a lot for me, putting out the first record and everything. I didn’t even sign no contract with him, no nothing. It was just ‘I belongs to the Chess family.’ ”

  Belonging to a family was an arrangement comfortable for Muddy in its familiarity. In Mississippi, Muddy had “belonged” to a family, knew how to get by — and get ahead — through a personal relationship with a boss man. The Chicago factories, on the other hand, were huge impersonal places. And through their work together, Leonard and Muddy developed a real friendship, a lasting friendship, two outsiders who captured the zeitgeist of not just an era but also a people and a place. When Muddy had his first promotional photo made, he was beaming.

  The record’s success paid in bigger crowds and better gigs — the Zanzibar and the nearby Boogie Woogie Inn on Roosevelt. Then it was the Chicken Shack, the Purple Cat, Lowell King’s club down from the White Sox ballpark. On Sundays, they played afternoon gigs at Silvio’s, breaking down around eight to set up elsewhere for a night gig, nine till two. Docie’s Lounge on the South Side, Romeo’s Place, the Squeeze Club, Brown’s Village, the 708 Club (a fancier place despite the exposed plumbing pipes that ran throughout), the Ebony Lounge. At the Du Drop Lounge, 3609 Wentworth, they shared the bill with Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie, a capsule history of recent musical changes presented in one evening.

  Prophetically, the printed label of this record put an “s” on Muddy’s last name. The transformation of backwater McKinley Morganfield was complete. About a month after his hit record’s release, Muddy rode home from a gig. “I could hear that record all up in people’s houses. I’d stop my car and look up and listen a little while. Ooooh, once I got a little scared. I used to wonder if I had died! All of a sudden I became Muddy Waters. Just overnight.” He’d become a blues star.

  In the two and a half years he was with Aristocrat, Muddy recorded thirty-five sides, twenty-five of them as bandleader. If Evelyn Aron, Leonard’s partner, dug Muddy’s music, Leonard quickly dug the way he sold.

  Muddy knew that his band was forging an exciting sound and he never stopped pressing Leonard to record them together. Leonard finally paid a visit to the Zanzibar. White faces there were uncommon, but Leonard was accustomed to that. “Muddy said, ‘Leonard’s here,’ ” Rogers remembered. “ ‘He wants to hear us play some of the stuff that we do.’ Leonard sat there and listened, looked around to see what the people thought about it. It was moving them. Leonard’s saying, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’ ” Sounds good then, sounds good now. Sounds eternally good. But the idea of wrangling that sound in the studio was beyond Leonard’s accomplishments. He’d recorded combos, but no groups as aggressive as this, and based on Muddy’s sales, he didn’t need to learn.

  While sales were good, royalties were not forthcoming. “Muddy couldn’t pay his car note,” said Jimmy Rogers. “We used to hide his old car to keep the finance company from takin’ it. He’d stay in it, send somebody in the store to get what he wanted. Then he’d come back over to my house and hide it in my garage. Chess would dodge him, say he’s not in or something, ’cause Chess was scufflin’ himself. But Muddy had to pay rent. He’d say, ‘Damn! It’s a wild-goose chase there with Chess.’ ”

  To keep a roof over their heads, they began picking up outside sessions. Sunnyland Slim gathered Muddy, Little Walter, Baby Face Leroy Foster, and a few others on a session for the small label Tempo Tone. Poorly recorded, it’s mostly piano with Walter singing. Jimmy Rogers, through backing Memphis Minnie in clubs, landed a session in 1949 for Regal Records. Everyone — Muddy, Walter, Big Crawford, the omnipresent Sunnyland Slim, and a drummer — pushed through the door with him. Walter grabbed the piano’s mike, relegating Sunnyland to the background and letting his harp assume a lead sound, diving like a duck between the guitars. The whole band cut just one song, “Ludella,” and the audio was again impaired by equipment limitations; it doesn’t capture the band’s full power, but it’s an exciting early sketch.

  By Muddy’s two Aristocrat sessions in the summer of 1949, he was showing off remarkable slide prowess. His solo on “Canary Bird” opens with a frenetic, crazed wallop on the strings, then unwinds like a madness over several bars. With “Little Geneva,” he introduced fans to his new girlfriend, Geneva Wade, who became Geneva Morganfield over the course of their nearly quarter of a century together, though never in the eyes of the county registrar. Born September 3, 1915, she was from Lexington, Mississippi, not too far from Rolling Fork. “I’d come across many, many women, but it seems like you know immediately when you find the one who’s exactly fit for you,” Muddy stated in a later as-told-to feature article syndicated to black newspapers. “When I met her, even though I was a recording success, there were still people who scorned my music. Geneva encouraged me to ignore them and fight for what I wanted to accomplish. I’ll never be able to put in words the way I feel about her.” She had two children when they met, Dennis and Charles, and Muddy raised them as his own. Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie, reared by the couple, remembers hushed conversations about a baby girl who died in childbirth. “It was never discussed,” she said. “But Geneva couldn’t have children after that.”

  The power in the spare sound of the Aristocrat singles was reinforced by Muddy’s songwriting. His third release, “Train Fare Home,” cut to the homesickness that resided at the new urbanite’s emotional core. Opening with plaintive slide notes, the electric guitar has a rich and intimate tone, softer on the strings than the keening sound of his first hit. Crawford’s bass, inconspicuous, lends an appropriate heaviness to the rhythm. Muddy sings:

  Blues and trouble just keep on worrying me

  Blues and trouble just keep on worrying me

  They bother me so bad, I just can’t stay here, no peace.

  If I could get lucky and win my train fare home

  If I could get lucky and win my train fare home

  I believe I’ll go back down in Clarksdale, little girl that’s where I belong.

  It seems so sad, child I wonder just how can it be

  It seems so sad, child I wonder just how can it be

  Everybody seems welcome in this old place but me.

  Muddy had been on a couple trips out of town with Leonard to visit disc jockeys, and he knew their records were reaching beyond Chicago. Now Muddy called Mr. Anderson at KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, and arranged for a radio slot. In late September of 1949, before harvest time, he took Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and Baby Face Leroy for a long month in the Delta. They arranged time off their day jobs or quit them to fulfill an old fantasy — becoming the disembodied voice they had so admired when Sonny Boy began broadcasting. On KFFA, their sponsor was a Helena store, Katz Clothing. The hour, however, came as something of a surprise: six in the morning, every morning.

  While Leonard may have been upset about temporarily losing his new main man, he appreciated the market Muddy’s southern stint would build. “All the time that we were on that radio station, we were touring through the South,” said Jimmy Rogers. “We played gigs till maybe one in the morning, then leave out of Mississippi and take the ferry over to Helena and go to bed. At five, you gotta be up getting ready to go to the studio. We were on from six till seven. It was rough.

  “One morning there, Little Walter and myself, we overslept. We were staying one place and Muddy Waters was staying another. When he gets to the studio, he had Leroy Foster playing the drums, and they went in and was beating away with the guitar, his slide, and his drums. We had the radio on in the hotel we were staying in, and that’s what woke me up. After they played this number the radio announcer said, ‘Well Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter is somewhere sle
eping it off. If they hear us, come on in.’ Then I had to wake Walter up, we get dressed and go down to the studio. They had played about three or four tunes. And I was gonna sneak me a peek and Muddy was looking right in my face, man. So he beckoned for us to come on in, so between the commercial and the song we came in and he had set up all the equipment. We just jumped in and started working out. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.”

  “We did a couple of little gigs in Helena,” said Muddy. “But as far as the radio would reach, people was callin’ me, like over in Mississippi and in some parts of Arkansas. We were playing all them little towns — Clarksdale, Shelby, Cleveland, Boyle, all the little towns. People would call up the station and get a date on me. I got a lot of bookings like that.”

  The band played juke joints run by friends from Muddy’s old days and gigs for strangers who heard them on the radio. They were featured at the grand opening of Clarksdale’s New Roxy movie theater. Electric instruments were spreading in the South, but Muddy’s ensemble sound was new. Even when they played acoustic in the unwired backwoods, the sensibility they brought to the old music was something to behold. Blues bands, four players creating one big sound, were not yet common.

  Robert Morganfield, Muddy’s half brother, saw him play at a little joint in Glen Allan, not far from Jug’s Corner. “It was an eating place during the day, had a Piccolo [jukebox], and on the Piccolo was some of Muddy’s songs, which was a favorite of the people. His band was two guitars, a drum, and harmonica. He had an electric guitar, stores had electricity. They had a huge crowd, bigger than the building.”

  And there was a command performance at Colonel Stovall’s home. “When he came back through in 1949, he had him a van and a band. And they was having a party — Colonel Stovall — and Muddy came up to the house where the party was in the van with the band,” said Myles Long. “And Muddy played there till late. Was about thirty people, everybody there knew him. Muddy had cut a lot of records. It was day when he left, around five the next morning. Muddy had a woman in there with him. Every time he’d come, he’d have a different woman with him.”

  “I couldn’t leave until I got over there to play for [Colonel Stovall],” said Muddy. “I’m on my way to Helena, he said, ‘You don’t go nowhere.’ He give us, oh, seven or eight dollars apiece and a whole good sip of whiskey. When I was there living, you couldn’t make but a dollar and a half.”

  The band was back in Chicago by November 6 to participate in a promotion at the 708 Club. It had been exciting to get out of town, gratifying to return south a success, and invigorating to hear the old sounds played the old way. But now the band — the musical unit as a unit, working as one to convey the emotion and feeling of a solo blues artist — was wired, fired, and inspired, and totally fed up with being shut out of the Chess studio. In January of 1950, they fell into a warehouse for the tiny Parkway label to cut “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” a victory whoop, a collision between the thrill of visiting a former life and the rush of resuming a contemporary one. Jimmy Rogers arrived late and is on only two of the eight tracks; these Parkway sessions were the first time that Muddy’s club band was in the studio together. “Boll Weevil” includes the full band and is truly an ensemble piece, with no one person or instrument taking the lead. The lyrics are a variation on a field holler about the boll weevil’s quick proliferation, but musically the statement is about eradication, if not of the farmer’s pest then of the old-style Bluebird blues.

  The standout track was recorded with just Muddy, Walter, and Baby Face Leroy. This “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” (issued variously under Little Walter’s and Baby Face Leroy’s names) could easily have disintegrated into an overenthused party record. The song is little more than a harmonica, a bass drum in overdrive, an occasionally ferocious slide guitar, and the orgiastic humming of several grown men. The sounds are pugilistic and sexual. Someone yelps. Someone else responds. The randomness of the interjections is frightening, the rapid-fire drumming disorienting. Muddy’s slide rings like loose spokes on an iron wheel, haywire. The harp is hypnotic. Chant and hum, chant and hum. Violence hangs everywhere, the sex heated and raw.

  The lyric’s tale of excitement and aftermath — “I roll and I tumble / I cry the whole night long / I woke up this morning baby / all I had was gone” — induces the musicians to lose themselves in the performance. The humming that was interspersed at the song’s start dominates the latter half; words are too confining. People are sweating to make this music, submerged in their being, transcendent in their passion, gone. The sonic quality is awful, the song more powerful as a result, as if this wouldn’t be allowed in a proper studio, needing a dark and surreptitious place to germinate.

  Muddy’s prominent presence, even if his name was not on the release, got Leonard Chess’s attention — and ire. Not pleased at having his star artist help a rival, he promptly marched Muddy to Universal Studios and, with only Big Crawford, made him record another version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” The Aristocrat version is exciting — Muddy’s guitar playing is prominent and clear — but it does not approach the transcendence of Parkway’s. Yet Aristocrat’s dominance in the marketplace assured that theirs would kill the shelf life of Parkway’s, and it did.

  Two more songs were cut at Muddy’s Aristocrat session, but not released for several months. These would be in the first batch of issues on a new label, formed when Leonard and Phil Chess bought out their partner. The B-side of Chess 1426 — the label took the owners’ names — looked backward to Muddy’s Mississippi roots, a version of the song Robert Johnson cut as “Walkin’ Blues.”

  The A-side also had one eye back, but the other was looking at the future. Like farmers who experimented to improve their crops, Muddy dug up his roots, cupping the treasured dirt that clung, and set them in a new field. He hadn’t hurried them. They acclimated. Over seven years he had become a Chicagoan. And now this would be the song to capture the young men overseas a decade later and, in the emerging days of rock and roll, it would name a magazine. They’d been singing “Catfish Blues” for years in the Delta, but it never sounded like “Rollin’ Stone.”

  CHAPTER 7

  ALL-STARS

  1951–1952

  Muddy Waters was nearly thirty-eight years old and entering the best years of his recording career. There in Chicago — which had become the Delta’s second home, which had given new breath to the spirit of Harlem’s Renaissance, which had factories burning ’round the clock — Muddy was about to help shape modern music.

  Words were becoming a major Chicago export: the Chicago Defender had become the most influential black publication in the country. Elijah Muhammad, whose Muslim theology was changing the way many African Americans thought about their place in the world, moved his headquarters there. Novelist Richard Wright, after living there for a decade, wrote the classic Black Boy. But Muddy, in less than three minutes, struck in the gut, no eyeglasses or education required.

  Lyrically, most of Muddy’s songs were about sex — sex with someone else’s wife, sex with someone else’s girlfriend, sex and trouble. But it was always a trouble he survived, a scrape he escaped. Sex was sex, but sex also became an analogy for a kind of freedom, a freedom to serve himself, to damn the torpedoes, the shift supervisor, and the overseer’s big gun. The sound of the songs reflected the newfound ebullience: Muddy, near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, corralled the sense of postwar possibility and excitement. The have-nots were finally having — not having much, but even a little was a lot. The muscle of his electric guitar and the force of his ensemble sound and the fierce assertiveness of his voice unleashed the exuberance of a people. There was cause for celebration, and Muddy was the vehicle.

  Billboard, July 1950: “Leonard Chess busts right into the disk field with his first two records on his very own ‘Chess’ label. Real clickeroos. ‘My Foolish Heart’ by Gene Ammons in the number-one spot among the jazz and blues locations here [Chicago], and ‘Rollin’ Stone’ by Muddy Waters getting gobs of orders
from the Southland.”

  “Rollin’ Stone” is a song about power, about rootless — and ruthless — independence. Muddy plays the electric guitar with all the force he’s been brandishing in the noisy clubs, though completely unaccompanied, laying bare every flick of his thumb and pull of his forefinger. A quick couple bass notes establish the rhythm, then a loping third note. A few more to catch your balance, then the whole angular riff again. Its jaggedness draws all attention to his right hand, his long fingers, the creases on the skin, the shadows from his cotton picking, guitar picking calluses. The distortion is bone rattling: the sound of teeth chattering, or being smashed. It’s the sound of industrialized, amplified, sex drive, overdrive power. He begins to sing: “I weesh,” enunciating to rhyme with the next line, “I was a catfish.” The sound is animalistic — predatory, after whatever comes his way:

  Swimming in the ho-oh, deep blue sea.

  I would have all you good looking women feeshing

  Feeshing after me.

  Sure enough after me.

  Then the guitar says it one time, leaving us a moment to contemplate this bottom-feeder.

  I went to my baby’s house

  And I set down, o-oh, on her step.

  She said, “Come on in now, Muddy.

  You know my husband just now left.”

  Sure enough he just now left.

  The guitar says it a couple times this verse, symmetry giving way to feeling. The riff saunters and scoots, a dog caught eating from another’s bowl, caught sleeping in his master’s bed, under his covers and all up in his sheets, sure enough where he’s not supposed to be.