Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  “Even at the end we still had fun,” said Jimmy Rogers, who phoned up his partner just weeks before his death. “I was getting ready to leave for Canada, a tour, and he told me he was getting better, that they were trying to build him up for an operation. He told me he’d be back as soon as the weather breaks. Around the first part of June he said he’d see me somewhere on the road. My wife was playing some of the records that we made down through the years, and he could hear it through the phone. He said, ‘I’m getting ready to come back through.’ I said, ‘That’s good,’ but he never did make it out of there.”

  Muddy had his son Joseph living with him at Westmont. The gap between their lives was immense, and ironic. Joseph had gone from having nothing, like Muddy, to living the American dream: suburban house, swimming pool, basketball camps, spending money, educational opportunities. Materially, he was satisfied. Muddy provided him a furnish. To give him an understanding of the grit that had produced these pearls, Muddy arranged for Joseph to visit Willie Smith’s mother in Mississippi. “His mom lived on a farm in Mississippi, and my dad let me go out there for a couple weeks. It was fun but it was weird. She had an outhouse with a bathroom. We had to get water from a well. She had a wood stove, you had to actually chop the wood. There was no electricity and the next house was maybe a mile away. It was pitch black and lots of mosquitos. I wondered what I’d got myself into. By the third night it was cool. Every day before I got up, I woke up to the smell of breakfast. That was great. I could buy firecrackers up in town, that was exciting. I never had drunk water from a well before or used an outhouse. I guess that’s how he grew up and he wanted me to get a taste of it.”

  On his last birthday, his seventieth (though celebrated as his sixty-eighth), there was a party at his house. His band was there, lots of family and friends. Phone calls came in from around the country. Muddy mustered his strength and enjoyed himself, though it exhausted him. Over the next month, he slipped in and out of consciousness, but he stayed at home, his last days spent among his family and loved ones.

  CHAPTER 15

  THIS DIRT HAS MEANING

  1983 and After

  He used to introduce me at his concerts,” Marva said in her soft voice. “I always asked myself why, why he’d scooped me up. I am shy-natured, and I didn’t like all those people looking at me. I hated it when he’d do that, but he’d say, ‘You can do it, you can do it.’ Now I know why. He was preparing me for representing him after he was gone.”

  Marva was next to him in their bed at home when Muddy breathed his last. He’d fought off the hospitals, avoided the chemotherapy, spent his time at home with his family. Late in the evening on April 29, his heart gave out. An ambulance took his body to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Illinois, outside Chicago, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 2:17 the morning of April 30, 1983. He was seventy years old. Cause of death was listed as cardiorespiratory arrest and carcinoma of the lungs. No autopsy was necessary.

  “Geneva was a very, very big churchgoer and that’s why, when Muddy died, I went to my church and asked if he could have the funeral service there,” said Cookie. “I knew that’s how his grandmother had raised him.” And so plans were made. On May 2, his casket was laid out at the Metropolitan Funeral Parlors on the South Side of Chicago. Muddy was dressed in a white linen leisure suit set off by a striped purple shirt and handkerchief. Thousands of fans made their way down church aisles overflowing with flower arrangements, great and small, sent by record labels, music publishing organizations, and fans from all walks of life. The Rolling Stones sent one of the largest spreads, with a note that read, “In memory of a wonderful man dear to us all. We shall never forget you, Muddy.” “I’m sure you never knew,” said the card on the flowers sent by Hank Williams Jr., “but I loved your music and learned a lot from you.” The Nighthawks, up and coming, ready to spread his word, sent a single rose. “This is overwhelming, an incredible outpouring of admiration,” Scott Cameron told a reporter. “These were Muddy’s stomping grounds. We couldn’t close it to the public.” The viewing lasted for three days. “I came from Europe to say good-bye,” said James Cotton. “People were lined up for two or three blocks.”

  “I went to Muddy’s wake,” B. B. King remembered. “I sort of thought like they do in New Orleans, like you should cry at the incoming and rejoice at the outgoing. I remembered the days that I could talk to him, the days he tried to help me, the music he could play — I’ve got some with me right now — and I was sad to see him go, but relieved that whatever bad he’d gone through, he didn’t have to do that anymore and whatever was good, these are memories we can all cherish.”

  “Mud was the type of person,” said Marva, “he didn’t want you to weep, he would want you to celebrate the way he was. His music was like that too. What went down with him when he was coming up, a lot of that went into his music, but he didn’t let that get him down. He was a happy-go-lucky person. Muddy loved to entertain. When he got in front of a large crowd, he had more fun than the crowd did. When he came home, his family was his main priority. He liked to cook, he baked cakes, he loved being in the kitchen. Most everybody that came to the house, he was always offering something. That was him.”

  The funeral service on Wednesday, May 4, was held in a large hall that overflowed, leaving hundreds of friends and fans stranded outside. Some had come to pay their respects, others to gawk at famous entertainers during their grief. “No single event ever focused so much worldwide attention on the blues,” Jim O’Neal reported in Living Blues. “It was all Muddy’s manager Scott Cameron and the Morganfield family could do to prevent the funeral from becoming a circus, but amidst the overflow of mourners, they did manage to conduct the proceedings in a manner as dignified as the way in which Muddy himself had carried out his mission as the King of Chicago Blues.”

  The service commenced at 7:30 P.M. Reverend C. W. Hopson, who did not know Muddy, officiated. Muddy’s family from Mississippi had come, from Michigan and elsewhere. There were his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and stepchildren. Leola Spain was there. “They didn’t want to let me in,” said Lucille McClenton, “but I got in.” Others in attendance included Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Memphis Slim, and magician David Copperfield. Johnny Winter was so shaken, he couldn’t speak. Pops Staples, another Mississippi Delta guitarist who’d made an impact on the world, sang “Glory Glory Hallelujah.” Several of Muddy’s recordings were played, including “They Call Me Muddy Waters” and “Got My Mojo Working.” The guitar screamed and cried, and so did the mourners. The family wailed from the front, some of them fainted. The funeral closed with the playing of Muddy’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” reminding everyone “the whole world knows who I am.”

  The next morning, mourners gathered at the funeral home for the ride to Restvale Cemetery. Like an Egyptian king, Muddy asked to be buried with his red Telecaster, a last favor that was not easily honored: the guitar kept the casket from closing, until the neck on it snapped.

  The cavalcade of cars left the South Side and drove out toward Muddy’s suburban home. Though the route had not been published, people knew, and the streets were lined with well-wishers out to pay their last respects. “It was like royalty,” remembered Mike Kappus, who had been an usher and served as pallbearer. The remaining pallbearers were drawn from his last band and other business associates: Mojo Buford, Lovie Lee, Ray Allison, Rick Kreher, and Tim Rosner. “I’m skeptical about the supernatural,” continued Kappus, “but this was quite amazing. We brought the casket to the burial site, and there was family in a semicircle around the vault. There were various flower arrangements in that area, they’d brought the larger ones near. As we set the casket on the support, there was a loud crack and the easel supporting this floral arrangement in the shape of a red guitar had cracked. Several of the women screamed.”

  That night, a spontaneous wake was held at Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge. Fans overflowed the walls, grooving and gawking. Buddy Gu
y jammed with James Cotton, and read a telegram from the city’s mayor, Harold Washington: “We know you’re with us, Muddy, so let the music play on, and on and on.” Hubert Sumlin was there, and Sunnyland Slim, who, at two in the morning, led an entourage to another club that was open later. Muddy’s spirit lived on.

  Muddy was buried in Chicago, but his heart never left Stovall, never left the sound and feel of the Mississippi Delta where he was shaped and formed. Late in his life, when interviewed by Margaret McKee, he laughed when his success was mentioned, said, “I’ve never been a big shot and I never will be one. I’m just plain Muddy Waters from Clarksdale, Mississippi. We got the headquarters from Stovall. That’s me.” He’d been around the world, and he still identified himself by the plantation office where he’d been paid, such as it was, for his crop.

  Sharecropping shaped Muddy, just as it shaped several generations. Richard Wright, in his 1945 introduction to Black Metropolis, asked, “What peculiar personality formations result when millions of people are forced to live lives of outward submissiveness while trying to keep intact in their hearts a sense of the worth of their humanity?” Muddy is but the study of a single person; however, his life proves a telling instance. His aspirations were never diminished, though how he achieved them was affected. He took where he could and left behind a path of destroyed relationships, women forlorn and desperate, family on unsteady grounding. He was a friendly, sociable guy who liked to be around people and play music for them. His determination to succeed sometimes diluted his artistic integrity, but his eyes never averted from the prize. He’d absorbed suffering and abuse at his emotional core, and the music that escaped from there resonated with feeling. He could not trust satisfaction, relying instead on immediate gratification, and he was worldly enough to know he was being shortchanged.

  If gospel music is about the future of one’s soul, blues music is about its present. Muddy began preaching the blues to a local congregation that needed temporary relief from oppression, and he found that the oppressed numbered well beyond his friends and neighbors. The passion in Muddy’s music grabbed listeners, absorbed and enveloped them, transforming their here and now. “The blue are . . . intensely worldly,” John Work wrote in 1943, adding, “The blues singer has no interest in heaven, and not much hope in earth.” So now there was a little hope. Nineteen forty-three was the same year that Muddy left the South, and soon after, he changed the sound of the blues. Chicago was a promised land and for Muddy it delivered. He had to work at it, but he knew his goal was artistic success, even at the expense of all else, including money and family. Blue Smitty wasn’t comfortable getting too far from his electrical work, Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter made too many concessions to the musical demands of the moment, and when that moment passed, so did those songs. For James Smith, one of Muddy’s guitar mentors on Stovall — Muddy says he could play as well as Robert Johnson — other endeavors or interests kept him from making a record. Muddy had a goal, and he stuck to it, paying the price. In the end, he did get money and he lived his last years in a happy family environment. Through Muddy, the blues became a music of hope — not just escape. What had been the music of oppression became the music of liberation.

  Towns in the Mississippi Delta are drying up and blowing away, the circle that Muddy swam in ever evaporating. Friar’s Point, Belzoni, Rena Lara, Rolling Fork. Industry is drawing people from the smallest towns, and each departure leaves only emptiness. No one arrives to fill the void. A Wal-Mart opens, several town pharmacies close. The old five-and-dime with the wood floor shuts its doors. There is no new tenant. Dust gathers.

  “My grandmother, Leola, got with Azelene’s children and their kids, and with her sisters — it was about five vans of us, and took us to Stovall after Muddy died,” said Cookie. “I always hated that she didn’t do it while he was alive, but he never was a big one about going back there. We’d ask him to take us and he had no interest. She showed us the post office, wasn’t big as a bathroom, and then the store and stories about that, and the church. Then she took us through the fields and showed us where Muddy used to play at. She showed us where they fished and where they would pick cotton, and where he used to play the guitar when they would call theirselves juking. Leola and her sisters were crying. If it hadn’t been for my grandmother and her sisters being there, we wouldn’t have known nothing about that area. We were really grateful that she’d taken us.” Leola Spain Tucker moved to Defiance, Ohio, in 1992 and died there two years later.

  Muddy’s estate is divided among the children he accumulated after Geneva’s death — his children with Lucille and with Lois. The children he raised — his grandkids and stepchildren — received a small lump sum and nothing else.

  Cookie’s children are off living their lives — in college or long graduated. Chandra, her oldest, recently purchased Muddy’s South Side home from the estate and wants her mom to move in upstairs. Yet Cookie’s suburban Chicago house, which should be quiet as an empty nest, rumbles with young children. She has taken in the children of Muddy’s outside daughters. “I always knew that Muddy kept the family together, but I never realized how much until he died,” she said. “I hear from these kids’ moms maybe once a year. I’ve lost respect for some of the others, but there’s no way I cannot love Renee and Joseph, because I raised them.” Cookie is a nurse in the same hospital in which Muddy died. In the mid-1990s, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. “When they first told me, I felt like them and I said to myself, ‘Oh God, it killed Muddy and Geneva and Bo and they were so dumb with this I can’t do this to myself.’ ” She has been cancer free more than five years.

  Her brother Laurence lives several blocks away. He plays golf on Sundays, drives a fancy car, and is raising a house full of kids with his wife. “We was his grandkids that was there from birth and these [outside] kids got all his money,” said Laurence. “I got some little animosity, but it’s okay. They have nothing. And I was the one that was going to be nothing. My house is fine, I’m fine. And my sisters came out okay.”

  Mercy Morganfield, Muddy’s daughter with Lois from the Smitty’s Corner days, has become an executive with a major pharmaceutical corporation. “I inherited my determination and drive directly from him,” she said, “the need to succeed.” During Muddy’s last years, he enjoyed placing two stacks of American green cash on his kitchen table, one for him, one for her — Miss College — and then racing to count the money. “You’re smart, Mercy Dee,” he’d say, “I don’t have to worry about you,” though he always, gleefully, won the cash-counting contest.

  Several of Muddy’s children have wrestled substance abuse. Joseph recently remarried and showed up to hear Big Bill Morganfield and Bob Margolin play together in Chicago. He is studying to be a preacher. Charles continues to hang out at Forty-third and Lake Park. He’s taken a room in the area and still lords over the gang of fellas in front of Muddy’s old house.

  Big Bill Morganfield has reconstructed his relationship with Muddy through music — the only way he could get to know him, the only way most anyone could get to know him. Bill’s debut recording, Rising Son, features accompaniment from Pinetop Perkins, Bob Margolin, Paul Oscher, and Willie Smith. They perform five Muddy Waters songs and several of Bill’s originals. “He knew he had a son that played, but to tell you the truth,” said Bill, “I stunk. After he died, I went and locked myself in a room for six years, a woodshed, and I learned it. Note by note. Measure by measure. All my dad’s records, I learned them. Maybe if I’d been there with him, I’d have been like the rest of them. None of his other kids are pursuing it. But I got it down.” Bill Morganfield was named Best New Artist at the 2000 W. C. Handy Blues Awards.

  Maxwell Street on a Sunday at noon. Seagulls circle overhead, scouring the empty streets for hot-dog-bun tips. The sidewalk stinks of urine — fifty-year-old urine. The buildings are bombed out. Plywood covers the windows — “Windy City Board Up.” Vagrant men hawk still-sealed porno tapes from plastic grocery sacks on their arms.
/>
  “If I coulda made thirty bucks, I’da been rich,” said Jimmie Lee Robinson. He’s the blues guitarist who was in Chicago and watched Muddy break out, and later accompanied Little Walter. He plays guitar today with spurs on his boots, because he can’t find good washboard accompaniment. He walks down Maxwell Street and sees a world that no longer exists. “Levitt’s put a kosher dill pickle in the bun with the hot dog and boy I liked that taste.” His city is punctuated by hot dog stands, and he discusses the past with relish. He is something like the inversion of Muddy Waters. He’s done well enough as a performer, releasing a number of albums and touring in America and Europe, but not having achieved the level of Muddy’s fame, he does not have to authenticate himself every night he plays. His lament — “coulda made thirty bucks” — could have been Muddy’s in 1943, prior to leaving the South, an unknown blues musician plowing a field behind a mule or atop a tractor and dreaming of the possibilities, the blues falling all around him.

  The nearby place where Jimmy Rogers lived when he heard Little Walter playing on the street is now beneath the foundation of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Physical Education building. Polk and Ogden, where Muddy and Jimmy first gigged, is part of the Chicago Medical School. Hy Marzen’s Zanzibar became a church, but since a fire, the roof has been propped up by two-by-four boards. Muddy’s first flop, at 3652 Calumet, is erased, a vacant lot in a row of stone buildings, three floors and a basement. Fences in the alley bear flowers, and plots of land are planted, a country feel in the city. Several of Muddy’s old clubs are beneath an urban renewal expressway. Smitty’s Corner is a currency exchange. The ghost of Maxwell Street past grows ever more transparent.

  Several of Muddy’s former players — the lineup is malleable — reunited in 1993 as the Muddy Waters Tribute Band. They’ve continued to do occasional tours in America and Europe. In late 1994, they recorded an album, You’re Gonna Miss Me (When I’m Dead and Gone), which was nominated for a Grammy Award.