Smitty’s was less of a shoebox than many of Chicago’s other blues clubs. The stage — there was a stage — was elevated a couple feet. A bar ran down one whole side of the club, and the floor was filled with tables and chairs; there was little room for dancing. Muddy still played no guitar and did little singing, but the crowds continued to come.
In 1958, Muddy’s brother Robert visited and, with Bo driving a Crown Victoria, rode with Muddy to another regular gig he maintained, midweek at the F&J Lounge in Gary, Indiana. “Muddy played till past midnight, and then we headed back to Chicago,” said Robert. “I thought we were going home to get some sleep, but he pulled into Smitty’s Corner and at that hour of the morning they were waiting for him to arrive. He was there till daylight. We got home, he went to breakfast and I went to bed.”
On Sundays at Smitty’s, Muddy hosted a matinee show. The band played the first couple numbers, then began calling up guests, and players rotated on and off the stage. “If you was good enough, you could get up and play,” said Willie Smith, a drummer who jammed there and later joined the band. “The music didn’t ever stop, it would just steady turn over.”
Like his girlfriends. When Dorothy found out Muddy was stepping out on her, she dropped into his gig at Ruby’s Show Lounge — like a ton of bricks. She broke every window in the band’s station wagon (she even broke the side-view mirror), which she had no trouble finding; on the side was painted “Muddy Waters and his Hoochie Coochie Boys.”
When Muddy arrived, he and Dorothy got to fighting and James Triplett stepped in to break it up. The cops thought the men were doubling up on the lady and threw them both in jail. The band used that night’s pay to bail them out. Muddy hid the station wagon so Geneva wouldn’t see it but the Chicago Defender ran a photograph of the car the next morning. Muddy dispatched Cotton to buy every copy on the corner. “Here come a little lady walking down the street,” said Cotton, “rang the doorbell. Muddy opened the door. She said, ‘Is Mrs. Morganfield here?’ Muddy said, ‘Hey, Grandma, someone wants to see you.’ The woman had the paper folded up under her arm. When Grandma got to the door, the lady said, ‘I just want to show you what a rotten motherfucker you got,’ and handed her the paper. And I left the house then, I got out the door.”
“I sometimes thought Geneva saw Muddy less than anybody,” said Mary Austin, a teenager he’d met in Florida who, when she accepted Muddy’s invitation to move to Chicago, was installed on a cot in his daughter Azelene’s West Side apartment. “I was nineteen,” Austin recalled, “his daughter was in her midtwenties, and she began calling me Little Mama. She opened her arms to this little country girl and we really got along. She was jet black and pretty, looked like her daddy. Her boyfriend was J. B. Cooper, a good-looking guy, light skinned. They both dressed real well. One of the first things ’Lene told me, and she kept telling me over and over, was not to use drugs.” While Mary’s relationship with Muddy’s daughter blossomed, hers with Muddy did not. Muddy rarely came around, and when he did it was usually to fight with Azelene. If Mary was too green to city ways to see what was going on, Muddy read the situation between his daughter and Cooper both for what it was and what it would become; Cooper had hooked Azelene on heroin and was pimping her.
“Right away Azelene and Johnny B. took me to this tavern in Jewtown,” Mary continued, “and that was our spot. We went there every day. Later I realized that J. B. was working her out of there.” Mary enrolled in a nursing school soon after her arrival. “Muddy was very jealous. When I would go out, if anyone would ask for a dance, he would come off the stage and it was a problem.” Muddy rarely allowed her to attend his Chicago gigs, though he did take her on the road. When she needed to reach Muddy, she left a message for him at the Chess offices. “He’d told them I could reach him there. Muddy told me he was married, but he told me his wife was very ill.”
When Muddy came by and Azelene was out, he and Mary made love on the cot. “Azelene was a lot like Muddy, very fiery. She looked just like him. One morning he came in there from a gig, I was sleeping in that folding cot — that cot was the only thing he ever gave me, he never gave me any money or helped with the rent — and he picked it up and tossed me and that bed, and Azelene jumped on his back. She was all over him. I carry a scar on my head from holding Muddy back from hitting her one time, she threw a plate at him and it got me. It wasn’t that I wanted to live with him because once I got to Chicago I found out who Muddy was, and after I got pregnant, I really found out. When I told him I was pregnant, I don’t think Muddy believed that the child was his son until after he was born. And then he couldn’t say he wasn’t ’cause he looked just like him.” Mary was in the Jewtown tavern one day, pregnant, when a man sat next to her, looked her in the eye, and said, ‘You don’t belong here, come home with me.’ Azelene knew him and approved, and Mary escaped. She maintained contact with Leola Spain, Azelene’s mother, leaving her infant with her while she worked. “Leola had a lot of spirit,” Mary remembered, “doing all she did and with only one hand — she’d had an accident at her factory job. But she knew what Muddy could be like. She knew.”
At Smitty’s, Muddy hired his first electric bassist. Fender introduced the instrument in 1953 and it had been slowly gaining appeal. It was much more portable than the huge acoustic bass, and once amplifiers could accommodate the deep resonance, its popularity spread. Muddy announced an audition for a bassist, and Andrew Stephenson — “A. W.” to his friends — showed up. “When James Cotton and Pat Hare saw I was from Memphis, they knew I could play.” Stephenson waited his turn. “The tune was ‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ it was the delay thing. You couldn’t play right up on it. When it came my time, I didn’t have a bass, I had to tune my guitar down. Muddy said, ‘I done went through fifteen guys so if you play this tune for me, you got the job.’ So, I played it. I had just made twenty-one. When I got with him I had to order an electric bass from Fender, and it took me six months before I could get it.”
In August of 1958, Muddy cut his most down-home number since “Blow Wind Blow” five years earlier. “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” though credited to Muddy, was written by St. Louis Jimmy Oden, Muddy’s friend and sometime housemate. Jimmy had lived in a rooming house operated by a mentally impaired, middle-aged woman and her mentally impaired son, who picked up change collecting returnable soda bottles. Inspired, Jimmy wrote a song called “She’s Forty Years Old” that was about her ways, which were just like a baby child’s. Muddy liked the song very much, but not as much as he liked nineteen-year-old women. So he changed that line, singing it like a man and a half, the kind who could keep a young girl satisfied. It’s funny what a word can do.
The next song, “Close to You,” became the single’s A-side. It lacks the subtlety and feel of “Nineteen Years Old” — Muddy overworks a forced laugh, using it at the end of most every line — but it spent more than three months on the charts, Muddy’s sixteenth and final appearance in the top twenty.
However solid Muddy made his tunes, rock and roll still seemed unstoppable. Needing another local gig, Muddy went to Johnny Pepper. Pepper’s Lounge, a slight place, had opened less than two years earlier. At the start, they’d used proceeds from the early night’s bar to replenish the late-night liquor. By the time Muddy came, Pepper’s was hopping with a “twenty-five-cent night”; a quarter at the door would get you in to see Otis Rush and all your drinks were twenty-five cents. It wasn’t the glory days, but it became Muddy’s home through the early 1960s. “Muddy came to me and said, ‘What about a job?’ ” recalled Pepper. “I said, ‘You a big man, I don’t think I can handle it.’ I said, ‘I only charge thirty-five cent on Thursday nights, and I couldn’t make enough to pay you.’ He said, ‘Try me anyway. We’ll get together on it.’ ”
Meanwhile, there was a young and beautiful waitress at Pepper’s named Lois Anderson, and Muddy got together with her. “She was a flirty type woman,” said Jimmy Lee Morris, who later played bass with Muddy. “She went from man to man, wasn’t
a one-man woman.” She stayed with Muddy long enough to have his third child, a girl named Mercy.
At Chess, record sales were down for all blues. Leonard understood how this would affect his longtime artists, but, approaching his company more like a family than a business, he refused to let them feel the full impact. “My father and Phil would look through the royalty statements,” Marshall said, “and I remember them once taking money from some artist and giving it to Wolf because Wolf’s statement had zero.”
But while Muddy was making the best of his thirty-five-cent nights, suffering with the diminishing loss of his American blues audience, his salvation was being orchestrated far far away. Across the ocean, some young men and women in England had heard Muddy. Like a coat from the cold, these British blues fans were about to extend a hand across the water.
CHAPTER 10
SCREAMING GUITAR AND HOWLING PIANO
1958–1959
It would be like going to a grocery store in Japan and trying to buy grits.” That’s how British jazz man Chris Barber described the difficulty he faced trying to find Muddy Waters in America. “You don’t know what to ask for or who to ask.” Barber played trombone, and his band was among the most popular for what the British termed “traditional jazz,” a sound heavily influenced by American Dixieland. Barber’s group was distinguished by their fondness for Delta blues; his trombone replicated the slide guitar parts. In a Mississippi juke joint that might have gone over like sushi, but it was all the rage in postwar English concert halls.
The Chris Barber Band was successful without importing American artists, but they savored improving their styles alongside authentic performers, and they enjoyed their company when traveling. They’d played with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and imported Chicago’s Modern Jazz Quartet. “The reason we had Muddy Waters in this country,” Barber said, “is because the MJQ’s keyboardist John Lewis told me, ‘If you don’t get Muddy Waters, then you’re doing it all wrong.’ And he offered to find him for us.”
Muddy was skeptical about carrying his music so far away. He didn’t know he had two four-song EPs available there, a mixture of his early Aristocrat material and more recent sides. In 1951, Big Bill Broonzy had toured England. He’d suggested Muddy make a similar trip, but the idea seemed so preposterous at the time that Muddy didn’t even consider it; plenty of gigs were available nearer home. But in the post–Chuck Berry days — hey, a gig’s a gig.
Cotton drove Muddy and Spann to the airport; Geneva came too. “When Muddy got on the airplane, Dorothy and Mildred were standing there in the hall to see him off. Geneva didn’t know them to recognize them. And when Muddy came back, I seen them then too.”
“I was going overseas,” said Muddy, “and I didn’t know what to think. And that was a big surprise for me.” The surprises seemed continuous and ever larger. They drove on the wrong side of the road, they called themselves talking English but you could hardly make out their words, and their money was funny. Muddy brought Spann to make sure someone on stage could speak his language.
They arrived Tuesday morning, October 14, 1958. This was their first international flight and likely their first airplane flight ever. They were surely tired, but excited British fans promptly knocked on their door. Among them were the writer Tony Standish and the guitarist Alexis Korner. “Right from the beginning,” writes Standish in his 1959 Jazz Journal account, “I received the impression that Muddy was not interested in discussing old, half-forgotten recording dates and who played what on what session.” Muddy did, however, obligingly unpack his white Fender electric guitar and pose for photographs. Learning that Korner played, Muddy handed him the instrument and said, “Play some for us, man.”
“The experts were obviously pleasantly surprised,” writes Standish. “ ‘Aha, [Big] Bill learned you that,’ chuckled Muddy.”
Their first full day, Muddy and Spann filmed a Granada TV show, People and Places, then were taken to Leeds, where their first gig set the tour on an inauspicious start. The Leeds Triennial Music Festival was a stodgy bill sponsored by a cousin of the queen; it featured string quartets and the odd acceptable jazz group. Muddy played Thursday and Friday; the dates preceded the Barber tour. “Very few musicians in England would have had any idea how to play with Muddy, or any idea what this music meant,” said Barber. “At Leeds, he played with Jazz Today, seven or eight good players. Kenny Baker was the leader — he later played trumpet for the Muppets. But the band didn’t know what to do.”
“They thought I was a Big Bill Broonzy,” Muddy said. “I wasn’t. I had my amplifier and Spann and I was going to do a Chicago thing. We opened up in Leeds, England. I was definitely too loud for them. The next morning we were in the headlines of the paper, ‘Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano.’ ”
Muddy joined Barber on Saturday at Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the first of ten dates. The show began at 7:30 and introductions weren’t made until an hour before, leaving no time to rehearse. “We’re white guys, late twenties, carrying trumpets, clarinets, a banjo,” said Barber. “Muddy was nice, but he didn’t say much. I asked Otis if Muddy began his shows with ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ He said yes, in the key of A.” Each show began with a full set by the Chris Barber Band, then an intermission, and then the Barber Band returned for a few numbers before bringing on their guests. Muddy spent the first half of the evening subjected to Dixieland and wondered if anyone in the entire country of funny-speaking people knew anything about the blues or his music.
After an intermission and a brief warm-up by the Barber Band, the stop-time chords of “Hoochie Coochie Man” sounded. Muddy came out in a dark suit, the spotlight reflecting off the conk in his hair, and Otis wore a white tuxedo jacket with a spangled orangey-red bow tie and black trousers, a stripe down the side. The brass players departed, leaving the bassist and drummer. Unlike at Smitty’s Corner, Muddy had no band to hide behind, no club to table-hop. He was on stage and he worked hard. Their sets varied each night, but this review of a later show at St. Pancras Town Hall, written by Tony Standish, reflects the attitude of those who embraced the music.
They began slowly, feeling their way before a quiet, listening audience. Gradually the music increased in depth and intensity, through “Nineteen Years Old,” “Key to the Highway,” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and Big Bill’s plaint from Parchman Farm, “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” By the time the spellbinding “Blues Before Sunrise” came up, Muddy had the audience hooked on the end of those curling blue notes that shot, shimmering, from the big amplifier box. Mr. Fender would be amazed at the sounds that Muddy Waters, out of Stovall, Mississippi, can wrench from his usually fiendish invention. And when Muddy slipped a short piece of brass pipe onto the little finger of his left hand, the sounds were eerie and yowling, a distorted electronic voice singing back at the intensely human one — answering, commenting, affirming.
Behind Muddy, Otis drove them down with all the facility bred of fifteen years around the blues clubs of the Chicago’s South Side.
They did “Close to You, Baby,” “Goin’ Out Walkin’,” “Long Distance Call,” “Mannish Boy,” and “I’m a Hoochie Coochie Man.” Muddy was really working. The perspiration rolled down his face, glistening in the spotlights as he threw back his head to sing — with it now and not letting go or up. Backstage, the ecstatic looks on the faces of the Barber Band were an indication of the moving power of a real blues singer. Keith Lightbody, the band’s road manager, was hopping with excitement, and my goose pimples were out in force. We were all well within hearing distance of some pretty fabulous music.
The [Barber] Band trouped on stage to join in on a stomping “I’ve Got My Mojo Workin’.” Muddy exulted through the wonderful lyrics; he did a little buck and wing across the stage; the band sat on a driving, wailing riff; and Muddy took it away and out. The applause was a storm out there, but a short encore was all Muddy could manage. He was exhausted from playing and singing, and a lot of people, this writer included,
were exhausted from listening. It was a glowing, happy sort of exhaustion.
Not everyone was glowing. Photographer Val Wilmer, who was an enthralled teenager when she saw Muddy in 1958, explained, “They wanted Muddy to be a folk musician, and electric guitar had not really been heard, not loud. The chords yes, but not that kind of wild playing.” Harold Pendleton, Chris Barber’s business partner, remembered that when Muddy Waters struck the first note on his electric guitar at St. Pancras Town Hall, one well-known critic and several of his cronies got up and walked out. “[Muddy] fiddled with the knobs [of his guitar],” the review stated. “The next time he struck a fierce chord, it was louder, and I realized that this was the established order of things. As he reached for the volume knobs again, I fled from the hall.”
“The artists this audience had seen were countryish, singing songs about plowing behind mules and telling a few anecdotes,” British blues scholar Paul Oliver said. “For the time, it was screaming electric. It was what Muddy would be playing in Chicago clubs.”
“I drove ’em crazy in fifty-eight,” said Muddy. “I went over there and they went stone nuts! ‘Where’s he comin’ from with all this noise?’ ” As the tour progressed, Muddy toned down his playing.
After each show, Muddy’s dressing room was crowded with fans. “All the London blues mafia was there,” said writer Frank Weston, “and Muddy was getting bombarded with questions from collectors — ‘Was that really B. B. King who was on the Otis Spann 78 “Five Spot”?’ and the like. Muddy was always a gentleman, lots of patience, always had time for the fans and collectors.”
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