The band was booked solid and needed a harp. Walter had made the instrument essential to any popular band. “Saxophone players were starving, piano players weren’t working at all,” said Billy Boy Arnold, then a rising harp player. “At that time you couldn’t get a job without a harmonica player.” Jimmy Rogers contacted Little George Smith, six foot two and lanky, who had been sitting in at various clubs, jamming with the Aces and Otis Rush. Rogers was recruiting personnel rather than Muddy, because Jimmy continued to hang out in clubs, visit Maxwell Street, and jam with musicians. Muddy, with women coming at him, preferred to diddle rather than fiddle. “Muddy, man he didn’t hardly know what Maxwell Street was at that time,” said Jimmy. “He didn’t know nothing about no musicians and places that we would go to. He’d go out to some woman’s house or take one to a hotel or something. That’s where Muddy was.”
The band returned in August, resuming their club gigs without missing a beat. On the first of September, they cut their first session at the new Chess studios, yielding their next hit, “I’m Ready.” Harmonica player Willie Foster, who occasionally accompanied Muddy on the road in 1954, went to Muddy’s house one Friday at the start of a weekend jaunt. Willie Dixon answered the door while Muddy was in the bathroom shaving. Foster recounts Muddy sticking his lathered face out the door, asking: “ ‘Are you ready?’ and I said, ‘Ready as anybody can be.’ Muddy went back in the bathroom to wipe the shaving cream off his face. Then he came back out and said [to Dixon], ‘Willie, are you thinking about what I’m thinking about? Let’s make a song out of it.’ We sat up there, I don’t know how long, trying to figure out what to put on it, you know. It took [Dixon] three days, I think, to finish it out.”
“Willie Dixon got credit for being a writer on a lot of songs he just played a part in,” said Jimmy Rogers. “But he made him some money that way. I had enough edge on him there not to let him hook me up that way, but Muddy went for it.”
The drums on “I’m Ready” pound with a furor, one of Fred Below’s finest moments. Walter plays a wondrous chromatic harp solo, holding notes twice the duration expected, then jiggling on down while Jimmy’s guitar supports him with a fancy dance. (The standard harp is like the white keys on a piano, but the chromatic includes the black; there’s a valve, activated with the thumb, that makes the chromatic notes an inherent part of the instrument. It can be played in any key at any time. It puts more color, an extra flex, in Walter’s wailing; the tone is different, more robust in a way.) Muddy sings with the force of a boxer; he’s not standing still enough to play guitar. “Muddy swings out. Lyrics are pretty potent and Waters’s delivery is Grade A,” wrote Cash Box, an industry trade journal, reserving their heaviest jive for the band. “Beat is solid and ork-ing is torrid.” That autumn, while the band was out on tour (at three months, their longest yet, including sixteen one-nighters with Little Walter, tearing up Texas like a tornado), “I’m Ready” hit Billboard’s charts, rising to number four over a nine-week stay.
The popularity of blues was crossing over to white audiences, opening up an incomparably large market. “It is becoming increasingly apparent these days that rhythm and blues is no longer restricted wholly to a Negro audience,” stated Billboard in an article titled “Pop Music Rides R&B Tidal Wave.” The story tells of a jukebox operator who “does a terrific business selling used jukebox records to [white] neighborhood kids. [He] claims the first items they ask for are numbers by such artists as Muddy Waters, Willie Mabon, and Ruth Brown.” Muddy was ready as anybody could be, but even that wasn’t enough for what was coming over the hill.
Harmonica player James Cotton was in West Memphis, Arkansas, finishing a Friday’s work hauling gravel when a man approached, said, “I’m Muddy Waters.” Cotton, who’d recently released a single called “Cotton Crop Blues,” had never seen a picture of Muddy Waters and had no expectations of meeting him. He looked at the stranger, tapped the vanishing half-pint of Echo Springs in his back pocket, and said, “That’s nice. I’m Jesus Christ.”
Then Muddy’s driver came forward. It was James Triplett, who had grown up with Cotton. Years had passed, and Triplett told of his move north, hanging out on the South Side of Chicago, and his recent employment with Muddy Waters.
Jesus Christ, it was Muddy Waters.
Muddy had been heading north from Florida when the harp position opened. “I had done got Junior back in the band, but he was running from the Army. We had a date in Memphis and James Triplett, he say he knowed a boy could play real good over to West Memphis.” “Cotton Crop Blues” spoke directly to Muddy Waters when Sun Records released it six months earlier, Cotton’s lyrics resonating deep within his being: “Raising a good cotton crop is just like a lucky man shooting dice / Work all the summer to make your cotton, fall comes it still ain’t no price.” Pat Hare’s ultradistorted guitar played low-down blues that swung like striptease accompaniment. Hare, who’d known Cotton more than half his life, would soon follow Cotton into Muddy’s band.
Cotton remembered, “We worked the Hippodrome on Beale Street Saturday night, that Sunday we played the state line of Arkansas and Missouri, and that Monday we was in Chicago. I moved in on the second floor.”
Elgin and his wife lived in the upstairs rear, Triplett was in front with his girlfriend and her two children. He was driver, bodyguard, woman wrangler, and general factotum. He was tall and slight, dressed like the knives he carried — sharp; he kept his fingernails polished and left the fisticuffs to others. The ladies called him “Killer” and so did the men.
Cotton paid Muddy twelve dollars and fifty cents a week for a room. “Paid it whether we was in town or on the road. No food with it, but by me knowing Triplett good as I did, I could cook in his kitchen anytime I wanted.” He was sent to the fabric shop at the corner of Halsted and Maxwell Street and fitted for two uniforms from the same bolts of cloth as the band. “Muddy paid for it and I started paying him back.” Cotton was in the music business and back on a furnish.
Cotton was a car man (he wrote one verse of “Rocket 88”), and Muddy liked that. While Bo was off chasing tail in Flint, Michigan, Cotton took to driving Muddy around Chicago at night. They’d talk about Sonny Boy II — Cotton (born near Tunica, Mississippi, July 1, 1935) was nine when he became Sonny Boy’s protege, covering the door while Sonny Boy played, covering the stage when Sonny Boy drank. They’d talk about Wolf — Cotton had recorded with Wolf at Sun. And they talked about the record biz — the Sun label was Memphis’s version of Chess and had released some heavy blues records. “It started because I was a pretty good driver,” said Cotton. “When Muddy would drink, I didn’t have anybody to go home to and if he wanted to stay out two days, I’d hang right with him. We’d just ride and drink gin. Muddy would never buy no more than a half-pint at a time. The guy at Forty-third and Drexel knowed him. Was a drugstore, hotel, whiskey store all in one. The store part was open all night, selling cookies and cold drinks. Muddy would come in, signal the guy with one finger, and the guy would slip him one. We also knowed a bootlegger right up the street from Muddy’s house. He didn’t make his own, but you could go after hours and get it. Muddy would go on these drinking sprees and he’d do a couple days — a half a pint at a time.”
As if filling Walter’s shoes was not intimidating enough, Cotton was promptly put on his toes. Jimmy Rogers picked up Cotton’s harp, said, “Let me show you something,” and dazzled him with his own playing. “Muddy sitting there,” said Cotton, “he [Muddy] grabbed it, played ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ ” Cotton played like Sonny Boy — straight notes — where Walter made the harp swing. When Cotton asked Walter how he did it, Walter turned his back and demonstrated. “It hurt me so bad I never asked him again. Spann was sitting there and Spann said, ‘Come on, Bro Cotton, I’ll show you.’ He played triplets on the piano and I started playing them on the harmonica. Spann learnt me how to play with Muddy. We were so close on him, we knew what he could and couldn’t say. Like, Muddy lisped and couldn’t say ‘trouble.’ S
pann would say, ‘Watch him on the third verse, he’s gonna jump time.’ We knew how to catch the man.”
Spann coached Cotton during the day, and they caroused at night. “Me and Spann used to go all over Chicago together. Muddy’d get off the gig and go his way, we’d go our way to other clubs. Chicago never closes if you know the right places. Spann had been there for years, and he knew all the places. We drank so much Seagram’s gin till I sat in the theater one Sunday evening on Forty-third Street, and I could smell it coming through my skin, Seagram’s gin and grapefruit juice.”
Gigs were still plentiful. A night would have three or four sets, sometimes six. The band would play the first one themselves, warming up the house, passing the spotlight, each member singing and soloing on his favorite songs of the day — some blues, but also their treatments of popular songs, from ballads such as “Misty” to the more rocking Lloyd Price numbers. When it was star time, Jimmy Rogers would hype the audience; if he wasn’t on the show, Spann would take it; if Spann was too drunk, Cotton emceed. The audience would put their hands together, all the way from Chicago’s South Side, Chess Records’s most famous recording artist, do you feel like going home? Are you ready? The Hoochie Coochie Man himself, Muddy Mississippi Waters. The band would launch into “I’m Ready,” their rhythm as crisp as the creases in Muddy’s tailored suit. Heading toward the microphone, he acknowledged the audience with a nod of his head, acknowledged the band with the rhythmic tapping of his foot. As he’d lean into the mike, he’d bend his right arm at the elbow — your maître d’ for the evening, fine blues our specialty — and snap his fingers. The night’s special: nourishment for the soul.
Top pay on the road was around five hundred dollars, though usually closer to three hundred — from which the whole band had to be paid, plus drivers, gas, and wear on the tires. Band members earned between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars each working night; they paid their own travel expenses and food. (The penurious sax player Bob Hadley carried a hot plate and often finished other people’s meals.) They stayed in all-black hotels, costing between ten and fifteen dollars a night, sometimes less. “Rooms was cheap,” Cotton said, “and girls was plentiful.”
Cotton usually drove the station wagon. “In our car, Spann’s sitting in the front seat with me, snoring,” said Cotton. “Bob Hadley, sax player, would be sitting behind me, asleep most of the time, and Elgin would be sitting on the other side, eating carrots all night, like a rabbit, so he could stay awake. He was a good company keeper.” The station wagon carried the gear — the suitcases filled Muddy’s capacious trunk.
Muddy was a friend to his band members, but he was also their boss. After a show, he’d have a drink, maybe a bite to eat, discuss what needed discussing, and then return to his hotel room, where the door closed on him and his road wife. Jimmy Rogers, as bandleader and disciplinarian, also distanced himself. Reefer was not allowed; tardiness to the bandstand or to the departing vehicles was not tolerated. Uniforms had to match. “One night,” Cotton recalled, “the dry cleaner had took the handkerchief out of my pocket and forgot to put it back. Jimmy Rogers fined me. They were that strict. They wanted a band and they had one.” How great the distance traveled from Stovall. Posing for John Work’s camera, Muddy did not ask Son Sims to pull up his right sock to match his left. Now he had an assistant to observe such matters.
Though Spann served many of the duties of bandleader, he had no interest in officially assuming such a position. “Spann didn’t care nothing about being the bandleader,” said Cotton. “He didn’t want to have to stay sober.”
Harvest time was always wild in the South. Money was flowing, and a loose audience pushed the band. There might be long drives between gigs; there might be difficulty finding a hotel that would accept cash from black patrons; there might be a bar owner who didn’t want to pay, or who wanted to flip a coin for double or nothing; or there might be a particularly good party after the show, where there was a piano, and whores, and whiskey, and Spann got to drive the eighty-eight keys like a Cadillac on the open road.
In Tuscaloosa, on a tour without a road wife, the whole band got thrown into jail. The trouble started, Cotton recounted, when “this guy bought us all this corn whiskey.” Everyone went on a bender. At some point, Muddy hid his money, then shacked up with the hotel maid. When he awoke, he accused her of stealing and went at her with one of her buckets. The cops came. A frantic call to Leonard Chess resulted in the appearance of a Tuscaloosa lawyer, who finally wrangled Muddy’s release. “I seen Muddy slap his girlfriend or something like that, but that was very very uncommon,” Cotton said. “To go out and grab the hotel maid like that, that was uncommon too.”
The South was where racism held strongest, but the South was also home. After a gig in Georgia, the band hit the highway. “I was driving the station wagon, following Muddy,” said Cotton. “We pulled into Rolling Fork. I thought, ‘This is Muddy’s hometown.’ He just went right through the little town, took us about five seconds, on out to his father’s house. He was driving a big white Cadillac. We got in about five or six o’clock in the morning, old man Morganfield came out there and looked” — Cotton furrowed his face in imitation of Ollie’s look — “looked again, then said, ‘That’s my son.’ Him and Muddy hugged one another. I enjoyed seeing them do that.
“Muddy’s daddy was a bit taller than he was, but you could see that Morganfield resemblance, and I guess from him working the field, he looked a little bit harder than Muddy did. They lived in a farmhouse, Muddy’s father and his sister [Luella McNeil], and if it rained, it rained right in on you. Muddy went in and went to bed. There wasn’t no entertainment but a big ole persimmon tree in the front yard. I cut some wood, I got Muddy’s car and wanted to go into town, the old man went with me. He showed me little stores and stuff, which there wasn’t much to show. We got some ribs, started a barbecue in the yard. I asked him could he play the guitar, I’ll never forget that, and he pointed to Muddy, said, ‘No, that boy!’ He was proud.”
At home, the South Side house stayed rocking. Phones ringing, meats frying, and greens boiling, the TV broadcasting a baseball game with the volume high or no volume at all, sometimes a shoot-’em-up (“Somebody with a gun shootin’ at one another,” Muddy said, “I can watch that all day”). Muddy, if he wasn’t going anywhere, stayed in cotton pajamas or a black T-shirt and black boxers. And always there was music. Spann, when he wasn’t seated at the Lake Park Liqueors bar, was playing the day away, making up songs in the basement, Cotton always ready to jam, Elgin nearby, Jimmy Rogers stopping in.
The basement was Muddy’s musical epicenter, though he was rarely down there. He kept musical instruments leaning against the wall, some album covers tacked above them. Whenever a song didn’t go right on a gig, the band would regroup in the basement the next day and Spann would go over it with them. The rehearsal room was long and hexagonal, with light from the one small window blocked by the large gas meter. The informality provided a comfortable place to let ideas germinate, though Muddy’s participation lent a new meaning to “sleeping on it.” He usually stayed upstairs, and if he heard something he liked, he’d holler down. When Muddy would actually come down, according to Cotton, “We knew that the next day or the day after we’d go into the recording studio. He’d be done learnt the songs because me and Spann would sing them. Spann was the master, but Muddy would take the credit. Spann didn’t care. Spann was a whiskey-drinking piano player. His interest was playing.”
Geneva made the place a home. She liked flowers and plants and painted the house with light, bright colors. She appreciated the step up the ladder, and as she could afford it, she purchased new furniture, French provincial for the living room. The bedroom she shared with Muddy was wallpapered with a calm yellow, a small pattern repeated on it. A clean house, a pretty house, was important to her; to battle the detritus from the constant flow of people, she covered the new chairs and sofas in firm, bubbled plastic. Drunk guests and rambunctious kids could spill what
they would.
“I went to Muddy’s house to take a record to Spann,” Billy Boy Arnold remembered. “Muddy’s house was well furnished and real comfortable. He was wearing a nice beautiful robe and pajamas and they were looking at the ball game. Muddy’s wife had some steaks big as your forearm, and gravy. Cotton came in the back door and went in the skillet or pot and got one out of there, started eating it.”
“You could always go raid her pots,” remembered Jimmy Lee Morris, a Delta guitarist who joined Muddy’s band as a bass player. “She’d see Mud going in the kitchen. ‘Don’t eat up all my goddamn food.’ ”
“The house was beautiful,” said James Cotton. “Being around Geneva was a pleasure. She was a good cook, a very nice lady. I used to bring her home some Old Grandaddy. We all used to bring her a bottle.” Either because of her preference for bourbon brands, or because of the way she mothered Muddy’s band, Geneva came to be called — by most everyone, including Muddy — “Grandma.” (Muddy, at the time, was referring to himself as the “Old Man,” and that name also stuck.)
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