Willie Smith, Calvin Jones, Jerry Portnoy, and Pinetop Perkins, calling themselves The Legendary Band, released seven albums and toured heavily. “Once we was in Charlotte, North Carolina,” Calvin Jones said, “and we played at a college there. Eric [Clapton] played some big place, he came over where we were playing at, sat in, and we had a good time.” One by one, the original members departed, leaving Willie Smith to rename the band and continue on. Calvin eventually moved back to Mississippi and lately divides his time between Senatobia and Memphis, touring when the calls come and playing sessions.
Pinetop Perkins, well into his eighties, has flourished with his solo career. Winner of eleven Handy Awards, he has released a steady flow of his own albums. “I have been up against it in my life,” he said. “I have played with many a person. But I liked Muddy like a brother.”
James Cotton’s successful solo career was interrupted in 1994 by a bout with throat cancer. Treatment was successful, and he soon resumed his recording career. His 1996 recording, Deep in the Blues, won a Grammy Award, and more recently he and Mojo Buford have been touring together, dueling with their harps, Buford singing the vocals.
Following his break with Muddy, Portnoy toured with Eric Clapton’s All-Star Blues Band for several years and recorded with him on Blues from the Cradle, one of the most successful blues albums ever. Portnoy has since developed a successful harmonica instruction booklet. “Playing with Muddy,” he said, “has made me as comfortable talking to the president of the United States as I am talking to a wino at the corner of Sixty-third and Cottage Grove.” Muddy as de Tocqueville: if the president can get the blues, the lowest of the low-down can get to be president.
Though his career has been plagued by missteps and bad juju, Paul Oscher has enjoyed renewed success. In the late 1990s, he formed a new band and began touring. With a very modest budget he recorded the excellent CD The Deep Blues of Paul Oscher. He recently dreamed that Muddy Waters came at him with a Coke bottle, trying to break his tooth. For two days following, he had pain in that tooth — though the nerve had been long removed. Muddy was remonstrating him for not playing. “The sound that comes out of the guitar is nothing without the person playing it,” Oscher said. “It’s just an instrument. But when you put your weight into it, to make it come out with that basic, deep sound — it’s not the guitar. There’s a spiritual connection.”
The road became a home to Bob Margolin while he was with Muddy, and he’s continued touring and recording ever since. In 1994, he attended the unveiling of Muddy’s postage stamp in Greenville, Mississippi. “I got off the bus early and went to the food tent, and sitting there eating in a cotton field in Mississippi, a young man who looked exactly like a young Muddy walked up to me and said, ‘Hi, Bob, nice to see you again.’ The second before I realized it was Joseph scared the shit out of me.” At an Antone’s nightclub all-star anniversary party, Margolin played a solo set of Muddy’s songs. “When I came into the dressing room,” Margolin said, “Buddy Guy told me, ‘Those are big shoes to fill. . . .’ Shit, I’m just trying to keep ’em shined.”
Scott Cameron continues to manage Muddy’s estate, and based on their agreement, Scott and then his descendants will continue to collect money earned by Muddy’s songs and share it with Muddy’s descendants. “When MCA acquired Chess, they had Muddy Waters far in the hole on unrecouped advances and recording costs,” he said. “I sat down with their business affairs people and I said this has gone on long enough. You’ve got to erase those balances, and you’ve got to give an appropriate royalty fee in line with today’s standards. At that point MCA was going through all kinds of bad press, and I said, ‘There are two choices, we either cut a deal or you get more bad publicity.’ In addition to Muddy’s estate, I represented Howlin’ Wolf’s widow, Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Memphis Slim’s widow, even contemporary artists like John Brim, Koko Taylor, and Buddy Guy. We got them all an up-to-date royalty rate and anybody who had debt, the balances were thrown out and they all wound up getting royalty checks and they have ever since.”
Marshall Chess assumed control of Arc Music Publishing in the 1990s when Gene Goodman retired, and in 2000 he reentered the record business with a label named for the original spelling of his family’s name, Czxy Records (pronounced “Chess”). As for returning to the biz, he cited a statement his father often made: “Once you’ve had the experience of a gusher, you miss it.”
Jimmy Rogers was seventy-three years old when we met in his South Side home. Several weeks later, he learned he had cancer; a few months after that he was dead. Such is the tenuousness of Muddy’s early history, of a life in an oral culture. That evening, he was just back from a southern tour and feeling fit. His living room was well appointed, with contemporary, comfortable furniture protected from our cognac spills by fitted plastic like that Muddy had in his South Side home. He smoked long thin cigarettes and spoke in a voice like the tickle of worn sandpaper, weathered without sounding rough. “I keep big pictures of Muddy right there at my bedside, him and Sonny Boy,” Rogers said. “They’re the first thing I see in the morning.” He was working until his death on December 19, 1997. Atlantic Records released an album that was finished posthumously, Blues Blues Blues, which featured friends such as Eric Clapton, Lowell Fulson, and members of the Rolling Stones. Less than a month after Jimmy died, Junior Wells also passed away.
Mary Austin, the mother of Muddy’s son Big Bill Morganfield, ultimately settled in suburban Atlanta. She remains an active member of society and, after recently retiring, has taken up modeling. Lucille McClenton was living in a government senior citizen’s center on Muddy Waters Drive when I first met her. Her apartment overlooked the South Side and the lake. She saw cool blue water and the white sails of boats, but there was no breeze inside. She had a grand view of the projects and of Muddy’s former house. After a few minutes of talking, she got fidgety and began to wring her hands, picked things up and put them down. She looked young to be in a senior center; her room was in someone else’s name. The lobby of the building stank of urine, the elevators were the slowest in the world. The sign out front, MUDDY WATERS DRIVE, had been warped and bent by the wind. On a later visit, she’d moved to the north side of town; she said she’d gone drug free and was trying to change her environment.
Marva Morganfield moved back to her small hometown in Florida not long after Muddy died. “I was beginning to live my life and he had lived his’n,” she said. “I was just a country girl, maybe I brought out what he was searching for all those years, what he missed after he left from Clarksdale. Mud was my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, he was all of that to me. I loved him deeply. I hurted when he hurted and there was nothing I could do. He’ll always be here. You’re not going to see him physically, but he’s always here.”
The blues may have come to Muddy on a dusty road while fixing a “punction” on a car, but an audience will always exist that understands “I can never be satisfied / I just can’t keep from crying.” On Friday, August 2, 1985, the street that ran by Muddy’s South Side front door was permanently renamed Muddy Waters Drive. On January 21, 1987, Muddy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That same year, the “You Need Love” lawsuit against Led Zeppelin was settled out of court; payment to Muddy’s estate was said to be around $200,000. In Rolling Fork, the town near Muddy’s birthplace, a plaque and a gazebo were erected in his honor on April 21, 1988. That night, at Clarksdale’s Civic Auditorium, ZZ Top headlined a fundraiser for the Delta Blues Museum’s Muddy Waters exhibit, unveiling Muddywood, an electric guitar made from a cypress plank taken from Muddy’s Stovall cabin. A thousand fried-fish dinners were sold outside the auditorium — Muddy always did appreciate a fish fry — and the event jumpstarted the city’s interest in its indigenous music. Hard Again’s “Mannish Boy” was used in the Hollywood film Risky Business, on a Miller Genuine Draft Beer commercial, and in advertising jeans in England. In 1984, a theatrical play entitled Muddy Waters (The Hoochie Coochie Man) was
produced by Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theater Company and drew crowds for several months. In 1986, it was revamped for a two-month run, hosted by the Beacon Street Theater. At the 1992 Grammy Awards, Muddy Waters was recognized with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, his song “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” was welcomed in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In April of 2001, Muddy was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. He would have surely appreciated the use, that same year, of “I’m Ready” in a commercial for the male stimulant Viagra. Muddy Waters was gone, and Muddy Waters was everywhere.
A generation has been born and matured since his death, and the testament to the endurance of Muddy’s music is his power over those experiencing a world he never knew. His legacy is as strong as it’s ever been. His culture — the blues culture — had an impact in the twentieth century that was, arguably, second to none. Duke Ellington evokes a cosmopolitan sophistication. Harry Belafonte’s catalog captures the breadth of African influence on Western song. Louis Armstrong conjures America’s melting pot. But Muddy’s achievement is the triumph of the dirt farmer. His music brought respect to a culture dismissed as offal. His music spawned the triumphant voice of angry people demanding change. This dirt has meaning.
A coatrack full of empty hangers. A potbellied stove with no flame. The first chill of winter in Chicago’s September air.
Dusk lingers, evening fending off night. This is the light when reflections are translucent, when a window reflects one’s own image as easily as reveals what’s beyond.
A shop front on Chicago’s South Side, the start of a new century. Two old men in their seventies, or maybe their sixties and hard living. The room is scattered with more objects than either will be able to repair in this lifetime. Which bothers them none as they sit and play guitar.
A TV on its side. Two-thirds of a three-way mirror. A curious white wax apple smudged with auto grease, a refrigerator covered with a 1960s psychedelic pattern. “Your fingers are a little stiff,” says the one who is not picking. His fingers are, in fact, palsied.
This room is long and deep. The ceiling is high, with fluorescent light fixtures hanging down several feet, and still way out of reach. The bulbs in most no longer even flicker. The sounds of glasses tinkling, patrons milling, matches lighting cigarettes, and old friends from the South stumbling upon each other in the North — these are all absorbed into the empty space now the domain of spiders.
The address of this shop is 706 Forty-seventh Street. Chicago. The South Side. This block is a series of shop fronts, old buildings with common walls. Next door, they sell furniture and bicycles, dining room suites with gold-painted aluminum frames, clear Plexiglas table tops, and padded chairs, the fabric of which will fray sooner than expected. The address of that shop is 708 Forty-seventh Street. It used to be a club, the 708 Club, and Muddy Waters played there. Regular. Howlin’ Wolf, once he began to attract attention, played there. Before them, Memphis Minnie played the 708 and after them, Buddy Guy played there, new in Chicago and thinking about returning to Louisiana.
The man and his companion at 706 lean back in their old office chairs, roll a little bit on the wheels. The chair arms are worn through, and foam stuffing seeps out. A young woman opens the front door and asks for spare change so she can buy drugs. No one gives her any money, but she sits down and listens to the guitar. They make her welcome.
“The blues were around way before I was born,” Muddy said. “They’ll always be around. Long as people hurt, they’ll be around.”
APPENDIX A
ITINERARY OF THE 1941 AND 1942 FISK–LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COAHOMA COUNTY STUDY
The Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study is a significant landmark in America’s appreciation of its African American art and culture. In a report to the Library of Congress after the 1941 trip, Alan Lomax wrote, “So far as I know this study marks the first occasion on which a great Negro university has officially dedicated itself to the study and publication of Negro folk songs. . . .”
The trip yielded many resources and was itself well documented. When recordings from the trip have been cited, the dates have usually been approximated. Through correlating journals and correspondences at the Fisk Library, the Alan Lomax Archives, the Library of Congress, and The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, I have determined the itinerary of the recordists.
In the 1941 report, Lomax also wrote,
The type of musical study which is herein projected and laid out will lay the basis, it is believed, for contemporary music history, for a new approach to the field of folk music, for a practical working knowledge of the musical life of people, which will be equally useful to scholars, professionals, and administrators in the field. The projected fieldwork will result in a study, jointly edited by Dr. [Charles S.] Johnson and his assistants, and by Alan Lomax, which will be published under the sponsorship of Fisk University.
The study was not only never published, it was misplaced, its hunt the subject of correspondence since 1945. During research in the John Work Archives at Fisk University, I located the complete study, along with complementary manuscripts by Lewis Jones, Fisk Department of Sociology, and Samuel Adams Jr., one of Jones’s students. Hopefully, these works will finally be published.
1941
The 1941 traveling party included John Work III, Alan Lomax, Lewis Jones, and a Dr. Ross, from the Fisk Drama Department. The sociologists and musicologists apparently split up while in Clarksdale.
April 29
Alan Lomax at Fisk University to emcee a night of the school’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration
July 30
Lomax writes to Dr. Charles S. Johnson, director of the Fisk Department of Social Science: “A number of people have suggested that southwestern Tennessee, which is slightly more stable than the Delta area, would be a better region for work than the one we have thought of already.”
Aug. 22
John Work writes Fisk comptroller, proposing a trip to Ripley, Tennessee (four days), and Carthage, Mississippi (eight days), leaving on August 27
Aug. 23
Lomax writes to Work from Washington, D.C.: “I shall see you the morning of the twenty-fifth, ready, I hope, for our trip to Ripley.”
Aug. 24
Lomax in Nashville [The destination was finally determined at a conference in Nashville. Dr. Charles S. Johnson, noting the density of the African American population in Coahoma County, swayed the others.]
Aug. 27
Recording #1a: Spirituals, Congregation Maple Springs
Aug. 29
Sleep in Clarksdale; travel to Hollandale, Mississippi, to record more spirituals
Aug. 30
Recordings at Mt. Airy Church; recordings at Morning Glory Baptist Church
Aug. 31
Recordings at Stovall with Muddy Waters
Sept. 1
Recording a baptism service in Money, Mississippi
Sept. 2
Recording in Mound Bayou with Mr. George Johnson, who’d been a slave of Jefferson Davis
Sept. 3
Recordings at Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, with Son House and Willie Brown
Sept. 7
Lomax in Rugby, Virginia, returning to Washington, D.C.
Sept. 20–22
Lomax in Nashville for Fisk’s student-training seminar
Sept.–Dec.
Two student field-workers remain in Coahoma County and are visited periodically by Lewis Jones and Dr. M. H. Watkins from the Fisk Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology Department
Oct.
John Work and his assistant, Harry Wheeler, begin musically transcribing the recordings
1942
The 1942 traveling party included Alan Lomax, Lewis Jones, and several of Jones’s students, including a Ms. Worley and a Senor Eduardo. Lomax worked alone in Coahoma, regrouping with the others periodically.
July 11
Lomax departs a folklore conference in Bloomington, In
diana
July 12
Bowling Green, Kentucky
July 13
Nashville
July 14
String band in Nashville
July 16
West Memphis
July 17
Recordings at Clarksdale with Son House, who then takes Lomax to meet Robert Johnson’s mother
July 18
Coahoma County sheriff detains Lomax; he sends a telegram, to Dr. Harold Spivacke, chief in the Library of Congress’s Division of Music: “Please rush very official letter of identification mentioning Fisk Field Helpers General Delivery Clarksdale.” Later, Lomax hears David Honeyboy Edwards performing as “Big Joe” on the street in Friar’s Point
Can't Be Satisfied Page 32
