“I was surprised how carefully the furniture was looked after,” said Oliver. “All the big settees, big armchairs, all covered in sheet plastic and fitted like a shirt, the perfect suburban home. They didn’t want to bring the South but they weren’t really quite urban either. It was summer and, to keep the heat out, they kept all the curtains drawn and hardly any lights on so it was difficult to see until the evening when they could throw them back. It made the place rather gloomy whereas the cellar was actually the brightest. It was painted a curious lemon color.”
On nights off, the whole house shut down by nine, stirring again between five and six in the morning — farmer’s hours. Oliver stayed several days, keeping late hours at clubs and conducting interviews from Muddy’s basement for his book Conversation with the Blues. “I think the thing that struck me most about Muddy,” he said, “was he spent most of the time sleeping. He gave out so much when he was performing. He said to me once, ‘You’re not performing unless you’re sweating.’ . . . Muddy roared, leaped, jerked in fierce and violent spasms. When he came off the stage he was in a state of near trance and the sweat poured off him.”
Little Walter was hanging out at Muddy’s gig, interrupting Oliver if he spoke too long to Muddy, and generally creating confusion. “Walter would call for another round of drink and then the waiter would come up and Walter would say, ‘I didn’t ask for it,’ and look at me with his eyebrows raised,” Oliver recounted. “ ‘Did you see me ask for that?’ He had been shot in the ankle and it was heavily bandaged. When I expressed some concern he ripped open his shirt and he was just covered in scars from knives and God knows what. He courted disaster, I think he rejoiced in it.”
After Oliver, Chris Barber showed up with his wife, vocalist Ottilie Patterson, off for a couple days from their American tour. “It was always amazing,” said Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie, “no matter how many of them came through or had to stay there, we always had room. Our dining room had a sofa in there, and in the living room there were two sofas. That’s how Muddy was. We would have two or three people in there or any stray we would pick up, it wouldn’t matter.”
Muddy welcomed the Barbers like family, placing their wedding photograph on the living room mantle alongside photos of Little Walter, himself, and other family members. Geneva prepared pots of food. “Chris Barber asked me to meet him at Muddy’s house,” said Bob Koester, whose Delmark Records was recording the contemporary blues scene. “Mrs. Morganfield insisted I have some food and I was probably missing a few meals in those days.” Stuffed full, he, the Barbers, and Muddy were driven by James “Killer” Triplett to the F&J Lounge in Gary, Indiana, where Muddy maintained a Tuesday-night gig.
The F&J Lounge was less a nightclub than a reception hall, densely packed with socializing people, the band an afterthought. “Muddy bestrode that stage,” said Koester, “totally in charge. He had the entire audience in the palm of his hand.” During one set, when the band announced Muddy, he tripped on some wires as he stepped across them. “There were all kinds of sparks and stuff flying,” said Koester, “and Muddy was just calm as hell, as if it was planned.”
Barber was wide-eyed watching Muddy strut about the stage for “I’m a Man.” The audience shrieked like the background voices on Muddy’s record of the song — “The ladies would swing their purses, saying, ‘Sing it Muddy, sing it,’ ” another visitor remembered, “the whole crowd would just go nuts” — and it climaxed with Muddy pumping up his machismo and taunting the ladies, egging them to egg him to reveal his manhood until, when the tension rose and could be no longer restrained, Muddy would unzip his pants and let loose — a soda bottle fizzing over the top.
(After the show, Barber, Ottilie, and Koester went to a nearby diner for breakfast. They were the only whites and the waitress ignored them until they selected several plays from the jukebox, contemporary hits by Brook Benton and Muddy. Their order was taken immediately.)
Paul Oliver also went to the F&J, driven by Muddy himself. “He had the radio on real low, and if B. B. King came on, or Howlin’ Wolf, then he’d turn it up to maximum volume and the whole car would fill with the sound and he would listen really hard. As soon as he heard Wolf’s voice, conversation stopped and he focused on that. And he’d mutter for a while afterward.”
As the reigning king of Chicago blues, Muddy could have had his pick of musicians. Instead, he ran his band like a good ole boys club, letting members bring in friends. He wasn’t looking for stars, just someone to fall in with his group and make the gig — dependability over musical ability. Spann stayed right by his side, but bass players came and went, rarely taking Willie Dixon’s spot in the studio, but playing gigs and tours: Marcus Johnson, Mack Arnold, Jo Jo Williams, Smokey Smothers; only Jimmy Lee Morris stayed a while. “I didn’t want to play Mud’s old stuff,” said Morris. “I was doing Bill Doggett, he was hot, or Jimmy Reed. But Muddy, Wolf, Jimmy Rogers — all that shit was dead.” Cotton, who’d seen Jimmy Lee play in Gary, told the new guy he’d get to stretch out the better half of the night when Muddy was off stage.
Muddy took to Jimmy Lee and soon he was bandleader. Cotton didn’t like that, and he turned over the driving and loading to the new players, warming up his throat at Lake Park Liqueors, where his friend was a bartender. One night, waiting out front for a bus and somewhat anesthetized, Cotton was shot five times by a crazed fan; when he recovered, he quit Muddy (he’d be back) to reprise his teenage position as bandleader. In the studio, he was replaced by a horn section; on gigs, the job went to George “Mojo” Buford.
Muddy brought Buford up from the “junior” band, a group that included Willie “Big Eyes” Smith on drums; they took Muddy’s gigs when he was on the road. Buford, from Hernando, Mississippi, had been an upstairs tenant of Muddy’s. Willie soon followed Buford into Muddy’s band, replacing Clay. “At that time being a musician,” said Willie Smith, “if you couldn’t play Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Elmore James, you couldn’t get on nobody’s bandstand.” The young Muddy had played Son House, Robert Johnson, and Leroy Carr songs; by the end of the 1950s, he was part of the pantheon.
Smith had come to Chicago for two weeks in 1953 and never returned to Helena. Five years earlier, when he was about eight, he heard Muddy and the band broadcasting on KFFA. James Triplett had been his baby-sitter back then; it was Killer who introduced him to Muddy. Smith and Clay, and sometimes drummer S. P. Leary, traded the drummer’s chair for the decade, until Smith settled himself in. Buford and Cotton traded the harmonica spot; Buford was in and out of Muddy’s band over the next two decades.
The guitar position was also volatile, though not as volatile as guitarist Pat Hare. One December Minneapolis day in 1963, half tight and armed with a fresh half-pint and a pistol, Hare fired a few shots at his girlfriend. She fled but returned to throw him out; guns and Hare were not uncommon. Neighbors phoned the police when more shots were fired. “The two officers, with [officer James] Hendricks in the lead and carrying a shotgun, approached the apartment door, which they found unlocked. Hendricks opened the door and caught a glimpse of Hare standing behind it with an automatic pistol in his hand,” the St. Paul Dispatch reported on December 16, 1963. “ ‘Give me the gun,’ Hendricks ordered.” Instead of complying, Hare stepped around the door and fired three shots. Two of the .32 caliber slugs hit Hendricks in the chest and the other in the groin. Hendricks dropped to the floor and patrolman Langaard, immediately behind him, fired three shots from his service revolver into Hare’s body at close range. “When the officers got there, Mrs. Winje [Hare’s girlfriend] was lying moaning on a davenport.”
Hare’s 1954 recording, “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby,” proved prescient. He’d killed his girlfriend with shots to the upper chest and abdomen. In the one-day trial he pleaded guilty to murder in the third degree and received a life sentence. In the pen, he formed a band, Sounds Incarcerated.
Hare’s replacement was James “Pee Wee” Madison, a left-handed upside-down guitaris
t who’d been playing modern stuff with Jimmy Lee Morris. “I played a couple sets with Muddy,” said Pee Wee, a demure, soft-spoken man with red skin, a quick grin, and a penchant for danger who’d come to Chicago from Osceola, Arkansas, and practiced guitar to Little Walter records. “That was my first real gig. He made the set easy for me, until I caught on.” Nevertheless, Pee Wee kept small change taped to the front of his guitar, possibly so he’d have carfare home in case he got fired.
Also coming into the picture was Sammy Lawhorn. He was in his early thirties, but had matured impressively around Helena, Arkansas, rooting his modern guitar style in Muddy’s Delta sound. He learned to swing with the beat, sway with the heat. There was just one thing: “He was a hell of a guitar player,” said Jimmy Lee Morris, “but he had a sleep disease.” Maybe.
“Did I have the impression that he was narcoleptic?” asked Elvin Bishop, who took lessons from Sammy. “No. You see a guy passing out, and a couple hours before, you see him drink two half-pints, narcolepsy is not the first thing that leaps to your mind.”
“All of us was drinking,” said Jimmy Lee Morris. “Everybody would be drunk. They’d call us the Muddy Waters Drunken Ass Band. Shit man, when you’re playing blues all night long, that’s life, man.”
McKie’s Show Lounge on the South Side was a new club popular with the younger African American set. To fill a week, they sometimes booked a blues band, though their crowd associated blues with their parents. Muddy took a gig there one Monday, and between sets, Willie Smith sat at a table with a couple young ladies. “Once you get in that position where pretty women are steadily flashing you, it’s pretty hard to not touch,” Smith said. “That’s the way that was.”
“I had just moved in that neighborhood, my first little apartment,” said Lucille McClenton (then Lucille Dease). “I was seventeen. I had two children. Willie was already at the table. Muddy asked was this my first time down there, and he asked me how old I was because I looked real young to be in a lounge. I told him I was eighteen going on nineteen. And he bought me drinks. I was drinking pea pickers then, a lot of gin and a little lime juice. And we started seeing each other. About a week later he asked me did I want to go out of town with him, he’d pay for my baby-sitter and stuff.”
Muddy had recently parted ways with Lois. Suspecting another mule in his stall, he told her he was going on the road, then opened her door to find her messing with his valet, C. D. (pronounced “seedy”). Under Muddy’s nose, C. D. had been pushing heroin, Lois a recent customer. “C. D. was a little pimp on the South Side,” said Cookie. “As I got older and was developing, I remember Muddy telling me, ‘Don’t ever go by that C. D. Don’t ever have anything to do with C. D.’ ” Lois died a decade later from a drug overdose. “She was on furlough from prison,” said Mercy Morganfield, her daughter. “It was self-inflicted. She was set outside by a hospital dumpster, where she was found.”
For nearly all of the 1960s, Lucille Dease was Muddy’s main road wife. She rode in the Cadillac to out-of-town gigs, was picked up in the Cadillac for local gigs, hung on Muddy’s arm and hung out with his friends. “I think Muddy always had high regards and respect for Leola, that was probably the only one he respected,” said Cookie. “But I think Lucille Dease was the love of his life. Lucille was his mistress all through my childhood. He was married to Geneva and she raised me, and just to see the hurt and the pain — how a man could do that to a woman who is supposed to be his wife — it was very disrespectful to Geneva and I felt he must have loved Lucille a lot to put Geneva through this.”
“I learned a long time ago that the only thing a black man have is his lady,” B. B. King reflected. “Nothing else. If he got his lady, he’s happy — as long as that lady’s happy. We still try to make some money because we know if we don’t, somebody else will and she’ll go over there. But I think from the days of slavery, the black male want to do everything he can to make her happy.”
“He was amazed I’d never heard of him,” Lucille said. “ ‘I’m Muddy Waters,’ and I’d say, ‘So fucking what?’ As the years went on, it hit me but then I didn’t give a shit who he was.”
There were other changes in Muddy’s personal life. He was in the South, March of 1962, when he got word that his father died. He’d visited Ollie the previous fall. With his brothers and a nephew, he was a pallbearer. “Ollie was a converted man when he passed away,” said Robert Morganfield, Muddy’s half brother. “He was a Baptist.”
Not quite his son. In Muddy’s household, “Geneva and I were at eleven o’clock church on Sunday,” said Cookie. “Geneva was a very, very strong Christian believer. Muddy’s grandmother raised him as a strict Southern Baptist. But I lived with him twenty-something years and I never seen him go to church or belong to church. But Muddy could quote the Bible. I think he still had the belief. When his cousins would come in, the reverends, there wouldn’t be the drinking around the house or none of that.”
In 1963, Muddy’s uncle Joe Grant died. Uncle Joe lived in the basement, and though he was only three years older than Muddy, he was heavy and not in good health. “I was a little girl and Muddy had been out playing,” said Cookie, who was five years old at the time. “The biggest thing in our home was when he would come in, we would make these big breakfasts. When I would hear that door open I’d get right up, it would be like a Sunday dinner right then. Geneva would always get up. Otis Spann would be there, his wife, and whatever band members that he would bring home. We were making pancakes, and I wanted syrup.” She ran down the back stairs to her uncle’s room and found him playing possum — awkwardly, half off the bed. She was several bites into her pancakes before she told Muddy. “Muddy went downstairs and he lost it.”
Joe and Muddy had been raised as brothers on Stovall. Joe had come to Chicago first, given Muddy an electric guitar. Losing him was losing his hold on childhood, and his final grasp of his grandmother. Muddy honored Uncle Joe with his next child, born to Lucille. “His uncle had just died, that was Muddy’s heart,” said Lucille. “Joseph was named after him. Muddy was crazy about those babies.” Lucille made sure Geneva heard the good news. “Lucille was very brassy,” said Cookie. “She would call, talk about it, put it in the paper if she can. She had no respect for our house.”
Life had not improved for Azelene, Muddy’s Mississippi-born daughter, Cookie’s mother. His ex-girlfriend Mary Austin remembered the last time she saw her. “She was out of it, her mind was gone. She was standing on the corner, leaning against a wall and looked at me but didn’t even hardly know me. By that time I knew about seeing tracks on your arm. Muddy had a disc jockey friend whose daughter overdosed from drugs. He was dead set against drugs.” On June 18, 1963, Azelene died of a heroin overdose; J. B. Cooper was in jail. “Muddy hated him,” said Lucille. “Muddy despised that man.”
Mary had, by this time, sent the son she’d had with Muddy to her mother in Florida and was making a life of her own in Chicago; she had instructed her mother never to tell the child that his father was Muddy Waters. “Muddy had brought me to Chicago and fed me to the sharks. He threw me out there to drown and I would have drownded. I knew nothing about Chicago, nothing about the fast life. If it wasn’t for Azelene first, and then that man in the bar — I named my child for him — I’d have been eaten alive.”
“When my mother died,” said Cookie, “Muddy was in his bedroom on Forty-third and Lake Park and he set on the bed and cried. Muddy was as much a family man as he could be. He felt he could do anything and get away with it. And he did. He did. But I’m grateful that he kept me and he kept my part of the family together.” Geneva phoned Willie Smith, letting some of Muddy’s friends know about his first child’s death; she knew Muddy wouldn’t tell them. Azelene Morganfield Cooper is buried in the same cemetery as her father, her grave unmarked.
Muddy continued his march into white America one fan at a time. Students twenty blocks south of Muddy at the University of Chicago invited him to campus for dinner and a performance. His hair was
pomped and he was dressed too slick to fool with crumbs and cafeteria sauce; he gave his dinner to Bo, who had accompanied him. Mark Naftalin, a keyboard player who would soon form a white blues band with Paul Butterfield, sat across from his hero. “He was immaculate as always, dignified as always,” said Naftalin. “If we exchanged more words than this, I don’t remember them. And in retrospect, of course, what I asked him was extremely naive. But I was sitting across from him and I asked if he’d ever heard of Robert Johnson. I’ll never forget his response. ‘My main man,’ he said, and that was it. ‘My main man.’ ”
It’s hard to tell from his recordings of the time. Muddy had successfully transformed the emotional depth of Robert Johnson to the ensemble attack of Chicago blues, but his recent studio recordings had forsaken everything for a shot at the white mainstream’s dollar. “The Muddy Waters Twist” (January 1962) percolates, but it’s completely devoid of emotion, and emotion was what Muddy and the blues were about. He’d been made a mannequin, propped before a fad. There is no Mississippi in the song, there is no Chicago.
Muddy’s willingness to be experimented on was indicative of his submissive relationship with Chess. During these same years, Howlin’ Wolf was cutting classic sides: “Spoonful,” “Down in the Bottom,” “The Red Rooster,” “I Ain’t Superstitious.” “Killing Floor” was yet to come. Even Wolf’s novelty numbers, such as “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy,” maintained a bluesman’s integrity; he generally doesn’t sound like he’s wearing a costume and trying to pass as Johnny Rocker or Peter Pop.
“Muddy didn’t have the drive, the initiative that Wolf had,” said Billy Boy Arnold. “Muddy let Cotton run his show. Wolf wouldn’t be sitting at no table with no woman. Wolf would be on that stage kicking ass all night long. Muddy was a great artist, but he became less of a draw in the Chicago clubs than Wolf, until the white audiences came along and rescued him.”
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