When Muddy wasn’t working, and between dates, he was a homebody. He liked to fix a big bowl of black walnut ice cream, pour a grape Nehi over it, and make a soup. “He’d lay in the bed all day and look at TV,” said Cookie, Muddy’s granddaughter who moved into the house before she was three years old. “And he’d eat ice cream. Sometimes he’d go on the front porch, but usually he’d be cooking or just be cooling out in his bedroom. When he was there.”
The phone rang all the time, and Geneva, who took care of the business around the house, knew not all those soft, cooing voices could be calling her husband about booking clubs. “They got along okay but it was a lot of friction because of outside women,” said Cookie. “He might be home five days and three days were good and then someone might call or he’d stay out all night.”
“I defended him in a number of paternity cases, probably four or five,” attorney Nate Notkin remembers, “and I never lost one. We always proved that the woman had other contacts.” In the mid-1950s, “the woman” — Muddy’s outside wife — was named Mildred. Muddy was around forty, she was about twenty. She had the nickname “Bubba” and was unable to get enough of her man. Around long enough to have a child with Muddy — nicknamed Poppa because he looked like Mud — Bubba’s spot was eventually taken by Dorothy.
Dorothy was a dancer, good looking and young, worked as a waitress on the West Side. “Kind of drove the old man crazy,” Cotton said. “She was attractive, it wasn’t hard for her to get a man. Muddy was kind of jealous.” To keep better tabs on her, Muddy got her a South Side apartment around the corner from his house. Cotton drove Muddy there after work one night, and she wasn’t in. They sat inside drinking gin. When their bottles were empty, they went back for new ones. And still no Dorothy. “Muddy’s pissed off now,” said Cotton. “Just as we walked out the door, there was someone who drove past in a Studebaker, and the lady in the passenger seat ducked down. Muddy said, ‘There they go.’ Muddy had a brand-new Chevrolet station wagon, red and white. Had about ten miles on it. We took off behind the car, Muddy driving. I don’t think the other guy knew the neighborhood, and we were so close up on him, the guy hit a post. Muddy run into the back of him. The guy jumped out running, Muddy told me to catch him. I knocked him down, brought him back. Muddy said, ‘Hey, this is the wrong people.’ The woman in the car wasn’t Dorothy. The guy was white, must have been scared out of his mind. Antifreeze and stuff was running out of Muddy’s brand-new car. Muddy said, ‘Let’s get away from here.’ We jumped in the car, left them there.” Ah, home sweet home.
“Only a few artists,” Billboard wrote in 1955, “such as Muddy Waters, Dinah Washington, Memphis Slim, and B. B. King have what is known in pop stores as a standby market — that group which will buy an artist rather than the tune.” Muddy was also the focus of a feature article syndicated to black newspapers around the country; it told the story of his career in his own words. In May of that year, Muddy cut his tenth top-ten hit. “Mannish Boy” was a slightly modified version of a tune he’d heard a new Chess artist named Bo Diddley performing for Leonard at an audition. “We were playing and Little Walter came in and Muddy came in,” said Billy Boy Arnold, Bo Diddley’s harmonica player. “Muddy was always coming to Leonard for one thing or another. Muddy wanted to take ‘I’m a Man.’ He heard it and he figured, ‘This guy is nothing, give me that song.’ ”
“Bo Diddley, he was tracking me down with my beat when he made ‘I’m a Man,’ ” said Muddy. “That’s from ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ Then I got on it with ‘Mannish Boy’ and just drove him out of my way.”
“Mannish Boy,” like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” was built on Muddy’s sexual persona, the song’s growling tone perfectly suited to Muddy’s declamatory delivery. “No matter what you do, some things come out all different, just your own. It’s like singing. Your face, and what you’re doing on your face, will change the tone of your voice. That’s where my tone is.” “Mannish Boy” is a facial workout. Pulling his cheeks so tight his eyes squint, rocking from his knees to give his throat an extra vibrato, wagging his head side to side like a dog shaking off the wet — against the stop-time accompaniment — Muddy sounds like a man possessed, a dog that meows, a cat that barks. He quivers and shivers, all sex; he grunts and swaggers, all school-yard boast; he moans and hums, cocky in his triumph. As he sings, girls squeal with delight, a party he can handle:
Sittin’ on the outside, just me and my mate
I made the moon come up two hours late.
Isn’t that a man?
I spell “M,” “A” child, “N.”
That represent man.
No “B,” “O” child, “Y.”
That spell mannish boy.
I’m a man.
I’m a full-grown man.
I’m a man.
I’m a rolling stone.
I’m a man.
I’m a full-grown man.
But even a full-grown man was going to have trouble standing up to the force about to be unleashed.
CHAPTER 9
THE BLUES HAD A BABY
1955–1958
In Chicago after a gig at the Palladium, a large room, in the spring of 1955, Muddy was greeting the after-show lingerers and late-night drinkers. One wiry kid wormed his way to the crowd’s front. He’d come up from St. Louis, where his band played all Muddy’s tunes. And with good reason: “He was my favorite singer,” Chuck Berry later acknowledged.
“Chuck wanted to get onto Chess,” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “Chess was the big thing for blues at that time. I told him to check with Muddy, that he could probably work out something.” Not only did Muddy Waters establish Chess as the label that young black artists aspired to, he also helped them get there. “Yeah, see Leonard Chess. Yeah, Chess Records over on Forty-seventh and Cottage,” Muddy told the young fan.
At Chess, Chuck Berry auditioned his homemade demo of a song called “Ida Red,” soon to be recast as “Maybellene.” “Maybellene” was a white country song performed with black musical accents. Inverting Elvis Presley, whose regional success would explode into national prominence the following year, Chuck was a black man playing white-inflected music with black accents. Leonard was skeptical. “Chess didn’t like no rock and roll for himself,” said Jimmy Rogers. “He was hung up on blues, because that was his meal ticket at the time.”
“When I came down there the next morning,” said Muddy, “Leonard didn’t understand what ‘Maybellene’ was. [I said] ‘You better record that, that’s something new here.’ ” Leonard listened to Muddy.
Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” at his first session for Chess in May of 1955, three days before Muddy cut “Mannish Boy.” Muddy’s early Aristocrat singles had been released over Leonard Chess’s objections, and they became his bread and butter. But still, after a decade immersed in the business, his ears highly tuned, Leonard Chess listened to Chuck Berry, silver on a silver platter, and the big record man could not hear it. But by now he trusted those around him, and he took a chance.
It would prove to be a brilliant gamble. Blues fans had grown up with Muddy Waters, coalesced around his music, and now their younger siblings and children wanted a say, a voice of their own. In 1940, there had been three million farms in the South; over the next three decades, that number plummeted by nearly two-thirds. Sharecroppers, which had numbered more than half a million, vanished — were no longer even a category in Historical Statistics of the United States by the end of the 1950s. The Illinois Central Railroad would soon cease its passenger service between Mississippi and Chicago. In 1955, when the new sound was breaking out, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. Art and society reflected each other, inspired each other. A bridge had been crossed, and it was now time to cross another. The blues — Muddy’s electric blues — had become a new music, a rebel music, until it became the established sound from which a new one could be born. The blues had a baby, and they named it rock and roll.
The blues remained Leonard’s brea
d and butter, though not his gravy. He knew his average blues single would sell twenty to fifty thousand pieces, enough to assure business as usual, enough to finance risks with new material. “Fuck the hits,” Leonard often said. “Give me thirty thousand on every record.” But with Chuck Berry, it was hard not to lose all restraint. “The big beat, cars, and young love,” said Leonard Chess. “It was a trend and we jumped on it.” Chuck Berry was awarded Billboard’s Triple Crown for “Maybellene,” “his towering hit,” number one on all three of their R&B charts: retail, jukebox, and disc jockey play. “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” came out in 1956, followed by regular chart appearances over the next two years, usually in the top twenty.
Flush, in the fall of 1956, Chess again moved its offices and studios, this time to Record Row, 2120 South Michigan Avenue. This studio was built from scratch, using the latest technology — a new studio for a new sound. But even with Berry’s profits, business was a struggle. Rock and roll was a risk and foreign to Leonard’s ears; he was not long from his first heart attack.
“The stuff that really started him,” Jimmy Rogers said of Leonard Chess, “he pushed it aside. And that happened to be Muddy Waters, myself, and Sunnyland Slim, Wolf, Eddie Boyd, Willie Mabon, Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, and a bunch of fellows. Chess, he got away from the blues.”
“Rock and roll kind of took over there for a while,” said James Cotton. “There was weekends that we couldn’t get jobs.” The music left them, literally, out in the cold. “Me and Muddy would get in the station wagon and drive around and listen to rock and roll. We wouldn’t go in the clubs, just listen to what’s going on. Lloyd Price was happening, ‘Ain’t It a Shame,’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley.” Sensing desperate times as the road gigs dwindled, Muddy left the local booking agencies and in August of 1955 signed with New York–based Shaw Artists, which had been booking Walter for three years. They kept him busy as “Trouble No More” and “Sugar Sweet” climbed the national charts, but it was definitely feeling like the party was over.
Sometimes they’re called hits for a reason: Chuck’s struck Muddy hard. Like Muddy’s blues had done to swing a decade earlier, the new sound was antiquating him, intimidating Muddy so much that in 1956 he simply stopped playing guitar. He’d stroll onto the stage and sing — the star — and didn’t resume playing until his first trip overseas, nearly two years later. Along with the guitar, Muddy also gave up much of his stage time. Around Chicago, instead of coming out after the first couple songs of each set, he came out only for the last few. While the band played, Muddy entertained from a table, granting audiences to his fans, shilling drinks for the clubs.
His first replacement was Cotton’s guitarist, Auburn “Pat” Hare, who, for almost a decade (until his temper led him to a life sentence in jail), remained a steady component in the band. Hare had the manic volatility of a street prophet, and favored a dirty, grungy sound. Playing with Wolf as a teen, he took potshots at him with live bullets, sending the huge man scurrying over a log pile. Wolf advised Hare’s parents to beat the lad, but he didn’t consider letting go of the kid’s guitar sound. Hare was in Houston with Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland when Muddy found him. Leonard welcomed him into the studio. At his first session, Hare shared guitar parts with Jimmy Rogers, and in addition to the classic “All Aboard,” they cut “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” which broke the top ten during its six weeks on the charts. Hare’s crunching power chords rippled with distortion that was well suited for blues in the rock and roll explosion.
But still rock ruled. The blues gigs weren’t paying anything like they had, and in 1956 Jimmy Rogers finally quit Muddy, no hard feelings, it just wasn’t happening for him anymore. He’d stick it out a couple more years with Leonard, then join Wolf for sessions and some gigs, but by 1961 the new sounds got the better of him and he retired from music for a civilian career. The way that fashions change, that’s the way music changes. Jimmy Rogers, despite so many hits so recently, was unable to make the transition.
Looking to replace Rogers, Muddy’s ears stopped at Wolf’s band. Wolf could be a volcano and word was out that his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, was recently lava burned. Muddy bedecked Bo in diamonds and jewelry, loaded his pockets with cash, and sent him to the Zanzibar, enticing Hubert by tripling his pay. It was diamonds over coals any day, and Hubert went. “Man,” said Hubert without the slightest sarcasm, “I cried a-a-a-all the way over there.” Taking Hubert Sumlin was like taking Wolf’s gizzards.
Hubert played on his first session shortly after joining, cutting “Don’t Go No Further,” Muddy’s last top-ten hit for two years. With Hare and Sumlin replacing Muddy and Jimmy, the sound was quite different: no slide guitar, not much Mississippi Delta, and a huge bed of distortion. Replacing the Mississippi night, which had lingered in the shadows of even Muddy’s most urban work, was the blue glow of television’s cathode rays, the teen beats emanating from variety shows such as Ed Sullivan’s and Milton Berle’s.
Sumlin stayed with Muddy about seven months. “What got to me was being on the road,” he said. In November of 1956, when harvest money was flowing in the South, Muddy set out for an extended tour. Hubert showed up with his guitar, amp, and a little hanging bag. “Mud asked me, ‘Is that all you got, just that one suit? You know we gonna be away about forty days?’ I’m going, ‘What the . . . This man ain’t told me nothing about forty days.’ . . . We did so much driving, I got the hemorrhoids so bad I couldn’t sit down. They brought me feather pillows that I had to sit on!”
For half of this southern tour, they were billed with a singer named Ann Cole, who also had a following throughout the South. Muddy’s band backed her, learning her songs as the tour progressed. There was one that particularly impressed Muddy, and upon returning to Chicago, on the first of December, he promptly hit the studio. Cole’s version of “Got My Mojo Working” comes out of doo-wop, but Muddy turns around the rhythm to give it more driving force. And though he changed only a few of the words, Muddy’s version credits himself as songwriter. Cole also recorded her version after the tour; it is credited to Preston Foster, the original author. A lawsuit between Foster and Chess was settled out of court, with the stipulation that Foster receive future credit; he sometimes does.
From the “Mojo” session, the band went to play the 708 Club. Muddy mingled with the audience, sipped from a fifth of Old Grand Dad, sat with a young girl. He didn’t get on the stage until the last two numbers before intermission. Sumlin was tired, dejected, and angry. He steadied himself on the bandstand’s electric fan and, either because he was full of fire or because of a faulty circuit, he got jolted by a mighty shock. “So I told Muddy I couldn’t play out the night. He got mad at me, called me all kinds of things, and raised his foot to kick me. I grabbed him. Here come Spann with a chain, gonna whip me about Muddy. I had a hold of Muddy, and every time Spann tried to get me with that chain, he hit Muddy. I said, ‘Man, when you get right, I’ll turn him loose.’ ”
Sumlin phoned Wolf from the club. “I said, ‘Hey man, that’s it. Whoever you got in there, they got to go. I’m coming back.’ He said, ‘No problem.’ After the gig, Wolf met us at Muddy’s house. He told Muddy, ‘Next time you do that, man, I’ll kill you over him.’ Muddy didn’t speak to me for a year, but we finally come back to being friends. Things were never right between him and Wolf, though. Those two were just like the McCoys, man!”
To keep up with rock and roll’s rhythms, the drums had to change. Elgin Edmonds had managed moving from jazz to blues, but when Chuck Berry changed blues, Elgin couldn’t keep up. Muddy fired him many times, but he never found a replacement and always hired Elgin back.
In 1957, drummer Francis Clay was living in New York and touring with Gene Ammons. Ammons got busted for heroin in Chicago that winter and Clay was stranded. Muddy was booked for a week in Cleveland, nearly halfway home, and Clay caught a ride. They arrived without time to rehearse. “I found out playing down-home blues was
not as simple as I thought,” said Clay. He had performed in church and at circuses, behind vaudeville and with country and western groups, could do bird and animal imitations, but he couldn’t get a handle when it came to Muddy’s stuff. “You need four separate minds to play the drums anyway, but this was so simple, I couldn’t get it.” Muddy took Clay’s sticks and demonstrated the beat.
Dancers may not have heard the musical chaos that first night, but one listener did: Elgin Edmonds. “He showed up,” said Clay, “sat in the lobby. I felt sorry for the cat. It was pathetic.” Clay’s week stretched to four years.
Like the man he replaced, and unlike his new band mates, Clay was born in the North (Rock Island, Illinois, November 15, 1923). He’d earned his reputation around Chicago before moving east, and he maintained his contacts there through heavy touring. Freddie Crutchfield stopped by Muddy’s gig to see Elgin and was in for a surprise. “I saw Clay and he was playing the blues real great with Muddy. I said, ‘Clay!’ ” Freddie raised his voice to a squeaky high question mark. “ ‘Whachou doing playing blues?’ I always thought Clay was one of the greatest jazz drummers in Chicago.” Indeed Clay was Mr. Bebop, the jazz man.
“We quit touring in January [1958],” Muddy said. “We got tired of it. We’d been on the road for five straight years, staying at home with our families about two months out of the year, so we decided we gonna cool it, gonna get work around Chicago and be at home with our families. The blues are so popular we can work six, seven nights just around Chicago.”
While there’s truth in it, Muddy’s emphasis on the local gigs was a deflection from the loss of national jobs to rock and roll. But not touring meant getting local in a big way. Smitty’s Corner was in the heart of the South Side, Thirty-fifth and Indiana, a corner property and somewhat larger than the other venues; its spaciousness made the diminishing jazz crowds feel all the more paltry. Owner O’Brien Smith “thought he’d try blues for a couple weeks and we stayed there about four years,” said Clay. “Soon as we started, the place was packed. There were two lines, one two blocks long on Thirty-fifth Street, and one two blocks long down Indiana.”
Can't Be Satisfied Page 17
