Down in Memphis, meanwhile, just before “She Moves Me” was recorded, a middle-aged man named Chester Burnett walked through the doors of the Memphis Recording Service and recorded his first single for producer Sam Phillips, who had yet to start his Sun Records label and was instead selling and leasing his tracks. Leonard Chess bought Burnett’s first recording and would later acquire the man’s contract; Burnett recorded under a pseudonym, and his “Moaning at Midnight” was about to make Howlin’ Wolf a star.
Like Muddy, Wolf embraced the Delta feel. His parents lived in Drew, Mississippi, which was near Charlie Patton’s home, and Wolf learned directly from the seminal Delta artist. He roamed the Delta juke joints, picking up gigs and earning a reputation. He later got a radio show in West Memphis, where his trademark howl, a variation on the falsetto favored by Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Muddy, and others, was broadcast far and wide. The burst in popularity of Muddy’s electric blues band sound — “Long Distance Call” was on the charts just before Wolf made his first recordings and “Honey Bee” was rising — informed Wolf’s music, whetted Sam Phillips’s appetite, and answered Leonard’s supplications for another star artist.
“When I heard him,” said producer Sam Phillips, “I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’ Then the Wolf came to the studio and he was about six foot six, with the biggest feet I’ve ever seen on a human being. Big Foot Chester is one name they used to call him. He would sit there with those feet planted wide apart, playing nothing but the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest sight you could see today would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what it would be worth to see the veins on his neck and, buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn soul.”
Also in May of 1951, at the same studio, B. B. King made his second recordings (his first had been three years earlier at a radio station). He’d left the Delta and become a prominent disc jockey in Memphis, where, seeking pointers, he met Muddy. “One of the things he told me then that I tell all the young musicians today: practice. He told me to be yourself, not to play for these people one way and these people another way, be they black or white. As great as I thought he was, he was very modest. I call him the godfather of the blues. He did more for the blues than most of us.”
Change was in the air. Jackie Brenston had released “Rocket 88” in May of 1951, its beat presaging rock and roll. Alan Freed went on the radio in July of the same year, calling himself Moondog and featuring artists such as Muddy, Wolf, and Brenston; he popularized the term “rock and roll,” and developed a white audience that liked the name. In Memphis, Dewey Phillips had, for three years, been playing these black artists back-to-back with whites, mixing bluegrass and blues, divining the feel beneath the rhythm and ignoring the industry’s categorizations. One of his most dedicated fans was a young listener by the name of Elvis Presley.
When “Still a Fool” left the national charts, “She Moves Me” ascended in its place. The other big sellers were Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years,” B. B. King’s “Three O’Clock Blues,” John Lee Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Give Me Central 209.” “At one time there was a wide gulf between the sophisticated big-city blues and rocking novelties waxed for the northern market, and the country or Delta blues that were popular in the southern regions,” Billboard wrote in March of 1952. “Gradually the two forms intermingled and the country blues tune [is] now dressed up in arrangements palatable to both northern and southern tastes.” Mainstream acceptance was first confirmed when major labels began jockeying for position. But it was the independents who better understood the business, and Chess Records, which had forged this new sound, was the leading independent. Establishing itself on Muddy’s back and using the demand for his records to shoehorn more of its releases into the marketplace, Chess had the industry in check.
The idea at the May 1952 session was to create an all-star band. Muddy had a marquee name, Jimmy had developed one, and if Little Walter could get a hit, they’d have a three-man front line. There’d been one session between “Still a Fool” and this one, at which Walter had failed to arrange for his own amp and had to play acoustically. This time, amps abounded, everyone was juiced. “We were sitting down [in the studio],” said Jimmy Rogers. “They would put a mike on the amp and a mike to the vocal. Sitting in a chair, we could see each other, and we’d play off each other in the studio, like we were on the stage. We would build it and then we would give a listen to the tape. Then we’d keep it running till we get the right sound we like.” Warming up with their theme song, they caught Leonard’s ear.
“At the time we called it the jam,” said Jimmy. “We’d do it coming on stage and during intermission we’d do a couple of verses and take a break.” Muddy or the others could address the audience, introduce band members or guests, make announcements, or generally clown around over a beat that would pique interest in the coming set, or make anyone think twice before hitting the door. (“If you couldn’t play that song, you couldn’t play harmonica,” said Jimmy Rogers. “They’d sit there all night to hear it, and we’d have harps singing up there on the street all the next day trying to do it.”) The jam that would become Little Walter’s classic “Juke” had no name. The give and take of the groove let everyone stretch out, and they’d pass the solo around like a pint bottle among friends. Jimmy and Walter could push their progressive ideas, while Muddy rooted the song with his slide. It brought out the best in all of them, especially Walter, curling his notes through the amplifier — and gradually the band let him take command of the tune.
Feeding his trademark quiver through the amplifier took Walter to another realm. “All my best records, I made them with the amplifier,” said Walter. “You can fill that harp with air. If you don’t, it’ll kill you. I can keep a whole lot of wind in that harp, I don’t have to do nothing but navigate with it then.”
Leonard leapt to the song. “He said, ‘What’s that?’ ” recalled Rogers. “He said, ‘Play that again.’ ” It struck Leonard the way it struck Muddy’s fans. “I could’ve had the song or Muddy, either one of us could have taken it,” Rogers recalled. “But we wanted Walter on record as well. We were trying to make an all-star unit out of the deal. And Leonard went for it.”
The harmonica kicks off the song with a short running riff, punctuated by a jazzy guitar strum; Jimmy’s influence is strong. In the middle section, Walter blows the riff big and fat, skronking like a horn, then retracts, changing the harp’s tone to the simpler country feel; he’s making taffy of the instrument. “Juke” shuffles and glides, it rolls and cajoles, brings a smile to listeners’ cake holes.
Among those who would end up smiling were the Three Deuces, a trio of kids still in their teens. Louis and Dave Myers had come to Chicago in the early 1930s, still kids and musically inclined. Playing a house party, they were introduced by some girls to a harmonica player their own age. “This kid was so small,” said Dave Myers. “He sit in with us, he could play all that Muddy Waters kind of stuff, and we clicked real good.” The kid’s name was Junior Wells, and he and Little Walter would soon switch places.
While readying Muddy’s next release, Leonard played an acetate of the instrumental in the Chess offices. The day was warm and he opened the door for a breeze. At the bus stop, a woman danced to the song. He played it again and she stayed, stamping her feet and doing the shimmy. There’s no higher test market than the street, and the song was rushed to release on August 6, 1952. On tour in the South, the band was between sets in a Shreveport, Louisiana, club when the song came on. Walter, recognizing his own harp — no one else played like that — rushed to the jukebox, saw the call number being played, traced it on the menu, and found his song, now titled “Juke,” by the band Little Walter and His Night Cats. The patrons played it several times in the course of the night, always dancing. Walter watched, listened, and set to ruminating. He phoned Chicago and spoke to his girlfriend
, who told him the song was getting a big push on the radio from the major disc jockeys. Billboard also took immediate notice: “Little Walter flashes some nice harmonica work in fronting a fast instrumental. The Night Cats back him solidly.”
Still in Shreveport, the band went to get new outfits. They’d left Chicago’s cool summer unprepared for the swamps of Louisiana. “It was so hot down there that we got little stuff you could wear and rinse out, it’d be ready to go the next morning,” said Jimmy. They bought seersucker suits, short-sleeved eggshell-colored shirts, and beige pants. The tailor told them everything would be ready that afternoon. “When we got back to the hotel, oh man, the girl up at the desk said, ‘The little guy with the checkered hat on’ — that was Walter — ‘he said for you to take care of his amplifier. He had a terrific nosebleed, he’s goin’ back to Chicago.’ ”
It was true that Walter suffered nosebleeds, and the band worried for him. For the moment, however, there was nothing to do but book a saxophone player to finish the tour — no other harmonica player could command Walter’s big sounds. “We made out with him,” Rogers continued. “Picked stuff you could kind of handle pretty good to make the nights.”
Back in Chicago, Walter immediately powwowed with the Myers brothers. He was ready to walk away from Muddy’s old-fashioned slow stuff, jumping to bring in the new. When Muddy’s band returned, they found their harmonica player in good health, if a little bigheaded (he tried to get his share of the pay for the gigs he’d missed), and they resumed playing — for about a week. When Walter jumped from Muddy, Junior Wells jumped toward him. Muddy never missed a beat, and Walter gained one: the East Coast–based Shaw Artists Corporation, booking and promotion, opened a Chicago office and signed Little Walter to a five-year contract; the Aces became the Jukes. Walter’s debut single spent twenty weeks on the R&B charts, where it hit number one.
Junior Wells was grounded in the country and the city, traveling between his father in Arkansas and his mother in Chicago. As a child, he remembered visiting a place where he saw the people dancing wildly, heard the hollering, and told his mother he liked that blues joint. “She said, ‘You wasn’t at no blues joint, you was at a sanctified church.’ ”
Born December 9, 1934, he was raised in Marion, Arkansas, near West Memphis — a barefoot kid getting dusty with another future blues star, Junior Parker, the two jamming on twenty-five-cent Marine Band harmonicas they bought at the Rexall drugstore. Junior and guitarist Earl Hooker learned to please crowds on the Chicago streetcar, riding “from one end of the line to the other, takin’ up a little change from it. We had a guy played the tub with that rope broom for a bass.”
As a teenager, Junior tried to buy a harmonica at a Chicago pawn shop, but didn’t have enough money. He took the instrument anyway and tried to raise the difference by playing for spare change outside the store. The salesman had him arrested and Wells was taken to court. Muddy signed papers as his guardian. “The judge asked me to play the harp,” Wells said, “and when I did, the judge gave the salesman the fifty cents and hollered, ‘Case dismissed.’ ” Then Muddy took him outside and popped him on the forehead.
“I raised Junior Wells from about a kid,” said Muddy. “He was in my band. He was too young to be in the clubs. I had to be his guardian. I had to keep him down because first thing you know he’d wanna fight!” Spann worked Junior into the band, as he would for each successive member, harpist or otherwise, teaching the songs and Muddy’s way of toying with the beat. But harmonica players were especially close to Spann’s heart. “I figure the harmonica is the mother of the band,” he said. “Once you get a good harp lead off, you in business.” Junior was young and quick. Within a month of joining, he was in the studio. He was seventeen and played amplified harmonica like he’d been playing it for all his seventeen years. His screaming harp on “Standing Around Crying” is every bit as exciting as Walter’s playing. Junior pushes the amplified harmonica till it wails in pain, then pulls it softly to make it purr. There was soon an irony to the title. Out one weekend with the band, Junior scored a girl and took her back to the hotel after the gig. Muddy’s date had fallen through, and not long after Junior entered his room, Muddy knocked on his door. When Junior opened it, Muddy barged in, threw Junior out, and locked the door. Junior was left standing around crying.
Still, ladies would come and go, and Junior had no reason to leave the band. When the army drafted him on his eighteenth birthday, he ignored the notice and was carted off by military police. He went AWOL and had to be hauled back once again. “Every time we’d look around,” said Muddy, “two of them big mens there looking for him, and he used to run ’tween their legs.”
About three months after Little Walter’s defection, Jimmy signed his own deal with the Shaw agency. His singles weren’t as popular as Walter’s or Muddy’s, but as bandleader he was better paid. Steadfastly holding to his formula, Leonard tried to keep the core band together in the studio. “We was running in and out of town,” said Jimmy Rogers, “and sometimes we’d meet up in Chicago and get a chance to cut a session.” He continued to make club appearances with Muddy; when his own gigs conflicted, guitarist Eddie Taylor filled his role.
Muddy’s selflessness made his sidemen more satisfied while in his band, but it encouraged their solo aspirations, creating an instability in his lineup: someone was always thinking about going out on his own. Those who wanted independence would want it anyway, and Muddy, despite the repercussions and the personal pain, remained undeterred in sharing the spotlight with his band members. “If somebody can shine, put the light on them, let them shine. It makes a better feeling in the band. [But] it goes hard when you get used to one sound and you have to go and get into another one,” said Muddy. “See, we knew one another’s thing, and we had no trouble out of that. When it fell apart, it went hard.”
CHAPTER 8
HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN
1953–1955
Song publishing is a complex and slippery aspect of the music business, but it is where most of the money is made. Artists recording songs written by others must pay a copyright fee — for the right to copy the song — to the publishing company, and the publisher pays the writer. (So, when rock bands began covering songs Muddy wrote, there was money for Muddy and his publisher — though the publisher kept it until a lawsuit in the late 1970s. When the Rolling Stones would record a Muddy Waters hit written by Willie Dixon, however, no matter how much they copied Muddy’s arrangement, the publishing payment would go only to Dixon, as writer, and his publisher — not to the original performer.)
Muddy’s phenomenal success caught the attention of Gene Goodman in New York, brother of Benny Goodman and a wealthy song publisher. He approached the Chess brothers and was surprised — and no doubt pleased — to learn that they had not been publishing their music. “They came to my father,” said Leonard’s son Marshall, “asking, ‘Who is handling your stuff internationally? Who is hustling your stuff with cover records? What about performance fees?’ We didn’t know about any of this, and my father thought it was better to have half of something than all of nothing.” The Chesses and Gene Goodman incorporated the publishing company Arc Music (an acronym for Aristocrat Record Corporation) on August 1, 1953. Leonard bought his first Cadillac soon after.
For Muddy and his band, not much changed immediately. When a session was completed, the artists lined up to sign or make their mark on union forms and receive their forty-one dollars in session money (double for the bandleader). Songwriters signed a publishing form, a penny per sale — to be paid later. The band’s money, their living money, still came from gigs, which paid better when records sold better.
Songwriting styles were changing. Jimmy’s solo success and Walter’s popularity indicated the record-buying audience was developing a taste for a more urban sound. Sensing that his star artist was on the verge of becoming the new “shoe stump” music, Leonard finally acceded to Otis Spann’s presence in the studio. In late 1953, they cut the two-sided c
lassic “Mad Love (I Want You to Love Me),” which featured a stop-time rhythm (several unified beats followed by a pause for the vocalist), and “Blow Wind Blow.” On a club’s jukebox, either side of this one would have filled the dance floor. Walter howls like a tornado siren. Spann’s playing is perfect — nearly invisible. He rolls under lyrics, anticipates the guitar riff, hides beneath it, bolsters the harp: he is generally all over the place without seeming to be much of anywhere. “People were wondering at first because I have short fingers,” Spann once said. “They figured I couldn’t physically play that much piano. But you can make a piano do what you want it to do. The piano is made for both hands.” (James Cotton, who would join Muddy’s band the following year, remembers Spann having the webbing between the base of his fingers surgically opened.)
The piano’s percussiveness created a need for more complex timekeeping; the fills were no longer so obvious. Walter’s drummer, Fred Below, came up with the Myers brothers, and both Muddy and Leonard had watched him. Like Elgin, he came from a jazz background, but his youth lent an innovation to his style. “I put a little swing into [the blues] to fill out the rest of the measure. I was dropping bombs in there to make phrases, sort of punctuating the end of the sentence. Sometimes I have to phrase to pick up the harp player and then push him into another phrase, because he’s breathing in and breathing out.” Below, who’d met the Aces through Elgin, began replacing him on Muddy’s recordings.
“Mad Love” proved a test run for Muddy’s biggest hit. “Hoochie Coochie Man” was brought to Muddy by Willie Dixon, a bassist and songwriter who would, within a year, bring Muddy other songs that solidified his hoochie coochie image: “Just Make Love to Me,” “I’m Ready,” and “Natural Born Lover.” Dixon untied, sorted, and repackaged songs, lyrics, toasts, children’s games, and an array of quips and boasts, putting his name on them and creating a catalog of his own, which other, more dynamic singers made into hits. He drew heavily from traditional sources, the era of recording and mass distribution codifying what had been a loose and communal pool of melodies and lyrics. “There was quite a few people around singing the blues,” he said. “But most of ’em was singing all sad blues. Muddy was giving his blues a little pep, and I began trying to think of things in a peppier form.” And of course a hit benefited its author as much as its performer (sometimes more so).
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