“When I wormed my way backstage, an eager sixteen-year-old, it was ‘Good morning little schoolgirl!’ all around,” Val Wilmer recounted. “Doubtless glad of some female company after all those earnest record collectors with their talk of forgotten sessions and obscure locations, Muddy offered me a drink.
“There weren’t many black people in this country then. Backstage, their bodies felt powerful because they had just come off stage. Sweat was coming through their clothes. They had Vaseline in their hair and their faces were all shiny from sweat. All the grown-ups seemed to me terribly matter-of-fact with them: ‘How about another drink, Muddy, old chap?’ The bottle of whiskey was there and Chris of course was there with his stutter and smiling face.
“Muddy was giving me the eye but he was giving everybody the eye. He was a great womanizer. There wasn’t anything nasty about it. I felt like his attitude was, ‘Oh well, you don’t know what you’re missing.’ Over the years I realized that, because he came from a segregated society, to make an approach to a white woman in front of white men, even though it’s not unsafe here, is still a taboo. He was reserved, which was quite nice. And Otis was very friendly. He squeezed my hand and gave me one of those looks and said, ‘I hope to see you again sometime.’
“Then I asked them for their autographs. Otis wrote his and then he pulled out a stamp for Muddy’s signature. Not realizing, I said, ‘Oh, I want you to sign it,’ and Muddy did but it was a great struggle because he could hardly write.”
“We found that the American Negro artists could never believe their luck here,” said Pendleton. “Chatting up the English girls was easy because there was none of the prejudice that there was in America. The jazz fans here had something like racial prejudice in reverse — if he was black, he could do no wrong.”
In an interview near the end of his trip, speaking with Max Jones, a writer for Melody Maker, Muddy made his point that the blues — his blues — was an evolving music, though he expressed it without musical instruments or terminology. He used a wad of cash. In miles, the trip to Chicago from Mississippi was not as great as Chicago to London, but the money in Muddy’s pocket symbolized a distance from his past greater than any that could be quantitatively measured. “There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to,” Muddy told Jones. “When I play in Chicago I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues — the blues we used to have when we had no money. I’m talking about when you couldn’t even buy moonshine, a hot dog even. When you were making thirty-five cents a day.” He dug into his pocket and waved the wad over his head. “How can I have that kind of blues with this in my pocket?” How did he explain it? The question came often, and the answer was always the same: he’d tap the side of his head with his forefinger and refer to his “long memory.”
Muddy’s tour of England was more than a significant landmark in his career. It revitalized him. The packed halls, the teeming dressing rooms, the questions and comments and praise from people so disconnected from the Mississippi Delta and from Chicago’s South Side all bolstered his confidence. “I didn’t play my guitar until about two months ago,” he told Tony Standish, “but I’m gonna keep on playing now. I won’t rest no more. Sometimes, when it comes up to a high tempo, I’m kind of slow — that’s why I got the lead guitar player, let him take care of that business. I’m slow, but when it comes to the blues, why, I got pretty good fingers.” He would soon buy a new guitar, a red Telecaster with a custom neck made of rosewood, strong enough to handle his heavy strings, and a raised nut to accommodate his slide. Before leaving, he told Melody Maker, “Now I know that the people in England like soft guitar and the old blues. Next time I come I’ll learn some old songs first.”
But the impact of Muddy’s tour was more than a validation of his career: it became an investment in his musical future. Like the imitators who sprang up behind Chuck Berry, like those who followed in the path of Muddy’s Aristocrat recordings a decade earlier, a number of the new fans at Muddy’s British shows formed bands of their own. A young Eric Burdon stood up at the Newcastle College of Art and said he had tickets to the Chris Barber concert with Muddy Waters and wondered if anyone else was going. John Steel stood up and said he was. They formed a band, the Animals. “I realized I could play guitar,” said Eric Clapton, “when I mastered this bit of Muddy Waters’s ‘Honey Bee.’ ” Davies and Korner heard confirmation in Muddy’s music to crank up their own, and their group, Blues Incorporated, would evolve into another one called the Rolling Stones.
Chuck Berry had made Chess Records a major player with the rock audience, and soon they found themselves selling not only a new style of music, but a new, more expensive format too: the LP, the long-playing, twelve-inch, thirty-three-and-a-third-RPM album.
Folk music was one of the first nonclassical styles to exploit the LP, being a genre that wasn’t oriented around hits; an artist’s repertoire was more important than how he or she played one particular song. The folk audience was predominantly white, and by the late 1950s, they were in their post-Levittown affluence. In 1958, a forward-thinking individual at Chess Records, sensing the new trend and realizing an opportunity, packaged twelve of Muddy’s songs from his decade with Chess and released it as The Best of Muddy Waters. It was an ideal introduction for the new market of consumers, giving the uninitiated listener a taste of Muddy’s breadth, ranging from his amplified Delta blues such as “I Can’t Be Satisfied” to his early urban blues band sound — “Honey Bee” — to the recent piano-and harmonica-led songs such as “I’m Ready” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” The songs were immediately attractive to the budding Love Generation: song one, side one was “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
Alan Lomax, who’d spent the better part of the 1950s in England (after being tagged a communist at home), was aware of Muddy’s acceptance there and put Muddy on the bill of a Carnegie Hall show he was producing. Lomax’s “Folksong: ’59” was intended to tell the story of American music in song. Muddy joined Memphis Slim, country singer Jimmy Driftwood, gospel artists the Selah Jubilee Singers, as well as bluegrass artists and New York folk interpreters. Bobby Darin was billed to represent the rebellious rock and roll, and he did so perfectly — by not showing up. After Muddy played Carnegie Hall, Chess went even more aggressively for the folk consumer’s dollar. Big Bill Broonzy had recently died (Muddy was a pallbearer), and while Broonzy’s fans mourned the loss, Chess offered them a replacement, an album titled Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill Broonzy. It pitched Muddy as a folksinger, as if “Hoochie Coochie Man” had never happened, as if he’d been raised in the coffeehouses that began dotting the northeastern cityscape.
The Broonzy album was recorded over two sessions in the summer of 1959. Francis Clay drummed on the first one; the second session introduced drummer Willie Smith, who would soon occupy the drummer’s chair, staying for the better part of twenty years. “When I was little I used to dig Big Bill’s stuff,” said Smith. “Them was blues at that time.” Issued early the following year, the album features a relatively unexciting batch of songs. The hard edges and angularity of Muddy’s best work are replaced by an approachable, somewhat superficial, blues style. Billboard didn’t mind: “A fortunate coupling — Broonzy’s material interpreted by Muddy. Blues fans will find this hard to put down.”
And it seemed like after his trip overseas, there was a turn of Muddy’s fortunes. Chuck Berry was indicted in 1959 under the Mann Act for transporting a fourteen-year-old Apache Indian girl across state lines for immoral purposes; before his trial, he was indicted again on a similar incident. Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin and fell from grace, and Little Richard left rock and roll for the grace of gospel. Rock suffered another major blow with the airplane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Payola became national news, and suddenly Alan Freed was not the man he used to be.
While rock and roll seemed to be nosediving, blues was getting a boos
t. Sam Charters published his book The Country Blues, pointing the way for the blues revival that would sweep the 1960s. This trend was further foretold by the trickle of European visitors and American whites who began dotting the South Side clubs. Muddy and Leonard were surely not done trying.
When Chess producer Jack Tracy introduced Muddy to Nesuhi Ertegun at Smitty’s at the end of the 1950s, the bluesman probably assumed the Turk another foreign fan. But Ertegun was a principal at Atlantic Records and had a lot of power in the music world. The meeting was casual but the music was extraordinary. Ertegun went back to New York and soon an invitation came from the coast that would propel Muddy to white America.
Meanwhile, the increasing numbers of whites — Americans and Europeans — who wanted Muddy’s company intimidated him. “Muddy was scared to talk to them, so he sent me,” said Clay. “I started telling him what to say. When writers would come in, he’d walk down off the stage and say [adopting a formal tone], ‘Good evening, I’m Muddy Waters, welcome to Smitty’s Corner.’ He got it down fast, he delighted in it.” Cotton remembered one night at Smitty’s Corner when “in walks Paul Butterfield, Nick Gravenites, and Elvin Bishop. Muddy Waters thought they was the tax people. He owed some taxes, said, ‘Goddamn, they’ve come to get me. That’s got to be them.’ Muddy hid in the office between sets.” The three were not from the IRS; they were budding white blues musicians.
The writers, the musicians — Muddy realized that white America was on his tail. Before the decade’s end, Elvis had recorded a song called “Trouble” in his film King Creole, and its striptease beat was very reminiscent of “Hoochie Coochie Man.” “I thought,” said Muddy, “I better watch out. I believe whitey’s pickin’ up on things that I’m doin’.”
He was right.
CHAPTER 11
MY DOG CAN BARK
1960–1967
Muddy’s tour of England laid the groundwork for the second half of his career, when he became the godfather of rock and roll and an icon for white audiences. His impact on the youth — electrified by his power and sensuality — sowed the seeds of the British Invasion, when rock and roll bands would remind America of its indigenous music.
But that would all be somewhat indirect. The terms of Muddy’s personal acquaintance with white America were established at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1960. He played raucous, hard-grinding Chicago blues, his band like a tractor driving up a hill. When Bob Dylan would play similar music at the Newport Folk Festival half a decade later, the audience would boo. Such a ruckus was unacceptable to budding hippies and committed folkies in white New England when it came from one of their own. But Muddy didn’t read Dylan Thomas or attend college; he shared neither this audience’s background nor their foreground. He dropped in on the folk scene like a museum exhibit from the wild — jungle music authenticated by jungle men. In case of emergency, break this glass. Muddy shattered it.
The blues program was held Sunday afternoon, July third. The day before, more people than the venue could hold wanted to see Ray Charles and the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. It was summer and hot, and about 300 tipsy jazz fans realized that only a handful of cops separated them from swinging with Ray. So they rushed the cops, who pulled out tear gas and water hoses, and such a melee ensued that by midnight there were three companies of National Guardsmen on the streets.
Muddy’s entourage saw the lingering mayhem as they arrived Sunday morning. They’d driven from Chicago the night before and would return the next day; a 2,000-mile one-night stand. James Cotton pulled the station wagon over when he saw John Lee Hooker standing on a corner, his guitar slung over his shoulder, no case. “You better get in here,” he said, and they all drove to backstage safety.
The town’s council, more comfortable with millions of dollars than thousands of marauding music fans, decided to terminate the annual party. George Wein, the event’s promoter, quickly undertook negotiations. Arrangements had already been made with the United States Information Agency to film the Sunday show for promoting American culture overseas. The council recognized their patriotic duty, and as a compromise agreed that the blues program — but no other events — could go forward.
Before Muddy played, his band backed Spann, who stepped out as leader, and also backed John Lee Hooker. Around 5 P.M., Muddy strode to center stage. His band wore formal white attire, he wore black. Standing erect, keenly aware how distant his South Side joints were, and how white this audience was, and how large, Muddy was solemn as he introduced his first number — recorded only a month previously, not yet released, and thus completely unfamiliar to the audience: “I Got My Brand on You.”
By the end of the next one, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” these songs about sex and fun were hitting home. No one (but the band) minded when he forgot the words to “Tiger in Your Tank”; vamping with the title only drove home the image. These squealing record buyers were riding right with him when, using the colloquial names of the male and female mule, he sang in the hip-shaking “I Feel So Good”: “I feel like a jack on a jenny / way over behind the hill.”
They went absolutely nuts for “Mojo,” clapping along and dancing to the best of their ability. Muddy, by this point, was completely comfortable, thrusting his hips and grinding as if he were on a familiar Chicago stage. “Lay it on me,” he told the band, and Cotton led them in a shuffling good-time breakdown that would have made proud Lewis Ford, Muddy’s rowdy levee-building partner from Stovall. Pat Hare’s guitar sound was the envy of all the young rockers. Drummer Francis Clay, among his kind at this jazz festival, embellished the rhythm; “Mojo” jumped as if newly mastered. “I wasn’t a hand to dance,” Muddy had told Lomax twenty years earlier, but during “Mojo” he showed Elgin movements, skipping over to Cotton, whisking him off his feet and into a fox-trot, then breaking into a jitterbug that defies every rumor and legend about Muddy’s stoic stage presence. Returning to the microphone, he repeatedly thrust his hips, emphasizing exactly to which mojo he was referring, and just how it worked. His authority was casual and majestic; the crowd demanded a reprise. Muddy gave them “Mojo” again, hammering home four times, “Got my mojo working,” because it was, and it did.
At the day’s close, all the blues performers assembled on stage for a medley of blues standards, passing the lead vocal. The sight of these luminaries together, and the thought that opportunities to recreate it at Newport were no more, so moved poet Langston Hughes, a member of the Newport Board of Directors, that he composed a poem on the spot, grabbing a Western Union blank and writing on the back of it. He handed “Good-bye Newport Blues” to Spann, who could read, and Spann, sharing the feeling, quickly returned to the stage, joined by most of Muddy’s band. Too drained, Muddy remained backstage; Spann sang lead, performing the poem as if he’d learned it from Friday Ford back in Belzoni. “It’s a gloomy day in Newport,” Spann sang, and in the next verse asked, “What’s going to happen to my music?”
The answer to Hughes’s lament is ironic. Muddy’s set, filmed by the USIA, was released as a live album. “Got My Mojo Working” was nominated for a 1960 Grammy Award in the category “Best Rhythm and Blues Performance.” In England, “Tiger in Your Tank” and “I Got My Brand on You” were promptly snatched up by Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. Spann’s Newport set was released on album in Europe, and he, who had recorded only four sides as bandleader, returned to New York the next month for a session backed by Robert Lockwood Jr., initiating a side-career as bandleader. The successful marketing of Muddy’s appearance established Newport as a blues commerce center. And, after a two-year hiatus, the festival resumed.
Muddy might have had an inkling of this success when, the previous September, 1959, two French blues fans, Jacques Demetre and Marcel Chauvard, introduced themselves to Muddy on a Saturday night at Smitty’s Corner. “Muddy expressed his joy, shook our hands, and presented us to his band: ‘Hey fellows, look at these cats who’ve come all the way from France to hear us. You’re going to have the time of your
life.’ ” They recounted their experiences in a book titled Land of the Blues.
A sturdy man, Muddy talked without pausing for a breath, until he had to go back onstage. Then he introduced us to the audience, which consisted exclusively of black people, most of them apparently modest employees who sat around little tables and didn’t dance. As soon as the band started, we were at the very root of the blues; theirs was the purest and most emotional music we had yet heard. Under the spell, we sat listening to them for four solid hours, enjoying this music that everyone seemed to understand perfectly.
After the gig, Muddy, concerned about their safety, insisted on driving the visitors back to their hotel. In the car, they inquired after blues singer Kokomo Arnold. Muddy had lost touch with Kokomo, but not with his passion for early blues. In the crisp night air of autumn, urban Chicago rolling past the windshield, he broke into song, Kokomo’s “Milk Cow Blues.”
Upon their return to Europe, the Frenchmen paid a visit to Paul Oliver (who had written the program notes for Muddy’s UK tour) in England and inspired him to visit Chicago, which he did the week after Newport, 1960. Muddy was “incredibly welcoming” and insisted Oliver and his wife stay at the house. “I couldn’t really believe that St. Louis Jimmy was actually living in the basement of Muddy’s house,” remembered Oliver. “I went down, saw all the waste pipes and plumbing passing through, and Jimmy was curled up in the corner.”
Equally amazing were Muddy’s other tenants: James Cotton was living upstairs with his wife and child, as was George “Mojo” Buford, who would soon join the band; Spann was still in and out of the basement, and Bo was often there; Muddy’s uncle Joe Grant (which Oliver mistakenly heard as “Brant”) also lived downstairs. Cookie, Muddy’s four-year-old granddaughter, had moved in a year earlier, and Geneva’s sons Charles and Dennis were part of the household.
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