Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  MCA Records has done a good job of mining Muddy’s unreleased tracks, outtakes, and even recordings not originally under the Chess auspices. I love the 1972 acoustic radio broadcast that makes up much of the second CD on One More Mile.

  There’s been a slew of live Muddy released. Much of it comes from the latter years and the recordings tend to blend. Collaboration is the title given to the only known recording from Muddy’s first English tour, 1958. The recording was made from the soundboard, through which Muddy’s guitar was not miked; his Telecaster went out to the room through his amp. So the sound on the disc is nothing like what the audience heard, but I find fascinating the general feel and vibe of Muddy and Spann in a foreign country that long ago. Muddy’s Carnegie Hall performance with Memphis Slim makes up part of Chicago Blues Masters Volume One (Capitol). There’s good music here; it’s worth seeking out. Another of my favorite live releases is Muddy Waters and Friends (Just a Memory, www.justin-time.com), recorded one morning at a Canadian rooming house. After Muddy plays his few songs on the acoustic guitar, the instrument gets passed around; even Spann plays it. There’s a companion to that disc, Hoochie Coochie Man (Just a Memory). The show is hot but so is the recording — distorted. Another live CD titled Hoochie Coochie Man (Laserlight, www.deltamusic.com) is notable both for its raucous slide guitar and its interesting set list (including “Rosalie,” an obscure track from the Library of Congress recordings). Recorded in 1964, the CD captures Muddy at his mightiest; during “Tiger in Your Tank” (mistitled “Sittin’ and Thinkin’ ”), when the guitar is about to overcome the vocals (as it rightly should, growling), the soundman abruptly adjusts it — it pains me every time. Nonetheless, among Muddy’s live discs, this one’s the one.

  Avoid Muddy Waters in Concert (Classic Sound); it’s horribly distorted. The CD Muddy Waters Blues Band Featuring Dizzy Gillespie is misnamed; Diz is only on one track. Fortunately, the set is not bad, but still, one hates to be tricked. The Muddy Waters Story (Chrome Dreams) is another deception. Labeled “spoken word biography,” it’s Muddy’s story, but told by a dulcet-toned British man. It’s not very compelling.

  Many labels are reissuing a lot of great music, and it’s possible to hear what Muddy would have heard as he was coming up in Mississippi and Chicago, and also to hear how his influence shaped music that followed him.

  You could do a lot worse than starting with the Delmark Records catalog (www.delmark.com, or visiting their Jazz Record Mart at 444 N. Wabash in Chicago). They offer plenty of Mississippi Delta blues, and even more Chicago music. In addition to the previously mentioned Little Walter and Sunnyland Slim CDs, they have an extensive Junior Wells catalog, and such goodies as Morris Pejoe and Magic Sam. For a sampling of their modern releases, try Lurrie Bell, Rockin’ Johnny, Little Arthur Duncan, or the Tail Dragger.

  The Testament label has enjoyed an extensive reissuing through the HMG / Hightone label (www.hightone.com). Pete Welding made sure he got in the right place with the right people. In addition to his great Otis Spann recordings (which feature Muddy), look for Robert Nighthawk, Houston Stackhouse, Jimmy Rogers — or sample several of these artists on one of the many compilations (my favorite, today, is Chicago Blues at Home).

  Alligator (www.alligator.com), Rounder (www.rounder.com), and Rooster (www.roosterblues.com) are good sources for modern and reissued blues. Rooster has reissued And This Is Maxwell Street, extensive audio recordings from a 1964 documentary that capture the sound of the street. Note Alligator’s Elvin Bishop and Little Smokey Smothers collaboration That’s My Partner, and their Deluxe Edition series of “best-ofs,” especially Johnny Winter and Hound Dog Taylor. Old and new on Black Top include the late Freddie King and the recent Rusty Zinn, who gets a 1950s sound in the twenty-first century. Earwig (www.earwigmusic.com) has good Honeyboy Edwards and Sunnyland Slim; Blind Pig (www.blindpigrecords.com) has Big Bill Morganfield, Bob Margolin, and Magic Slim; check Silvertone (www.silvertonerecords.com) for Buddy Guy. Catfish Records (www.catfishrecords.com), an English label, has issued The Roots of Muddy Waters, a great compilation of songs that Muddy drew from.

  Vanguard Records (www.vanguardrecords.com) has become a contender in the blues reissue market. In addition to their compilations from Newport Festivals and their pretty decent and reasonably priced thematic compilations (Blues with a Feeling, Great Harp Players, Frett’n the Blues), they have reissued the Chicago / The Blues / Today! series in one package. There’s good stuff under the Fantasy umbrella (www.fantasyjazz.com) from a variety of labels, especially Bluesville, Takoma, and Stax. Ryko (www.rykodisc.com) was issuing much of the Tradition and Everest labels; Putumayo (www.putamayo.com) has combined some African roots with its blues legacy, such as the compilation From Mali to Memphis. Dig Birdman Records, Smithsonian / Folkways, Easy Baby, Amina, Acoustech, Document, Yazoo, and Arhoolie (John Littlejohn’s Slidin’ Home belongs in every home).

  These addresses are good places to get started for Muddy Waters and blues on the Internet:

  www.blues.org (The Blues Foundation)

  www.bluesworld.com

  http://theblueshighway.com

  http://bluesnet.hub.org

  http://blueslinks.tripod.com

  www.muddywaters.com

  NOTES

  GENERAL READING SUGGESTIONS

  For a broad history of the blues, the best place to start is Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. Get to know the players by reading their profiles in Peter Guralnick’s two collections, Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. His Searching for Robert Johnson is also a good macroview of the Delta. (Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music is the best place to learn about soul music, which evolved from blues.)

  My feel for Delta life was greatly enhanced by The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, the recent autobiography of Honeyboy Edwards. Other good sources for insight into early blues include Henry Townsend and Bill Greensmith’s A Blues Life and Mance Lipscomb’s autobiography, I Say Me for a Parable. James Agee writes beautifully about the sharecropper’s life in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. David Cohn’s Where I Was Born and Raised, though somewhat paternalistic (or perhaps because of that), was a well-written overview of 1920s Delta life from a white perspective. Gayle Dean Wardlow’s Chasin’ That Devil Music includes much of the author’s research about early blues artists and life in Mississippi; it’s fascinating reading, comes with a CD, and is probably best appreciated after gaining an introduction to the musicians elsewhere. Sit in on interview after interview with the greats in Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel’s The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine (Routledge). Hear them speak in Paul Trynka and Val Wilmer’s Portrait of the Blues.

  Paul Oliver has written extensively about blues. The text to read first is Conversation with the Blues, a mosaic compiled from his firsthand accounts of growing up with the blues. It has been recently republished, with many photographs added, and comes with a CD of his field recordings.

  For a history of Chicago blues, Mike Rowe’s aptly titled Chicago Blues has a lot of information and a lot of pictures. The best factual account of the Chess Brothers, and also a good history of the recording scene in Chicago, is Nadine Cohodas’s Spinning Blues into Gold. Finally, there are two books that focus on Muddy Waters. Bossmen, by James Rooney, is essentially an oral history, told almost solely in Muddy’s words. Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man, by Sandra B. Tooze, uses an extended Muddy discography as its foundation, tracing his life through his recordings.

  Muddy Waters was a decade and a half dead when I began this book, and many of the people from his early years had also passed away. I am indebted to the many researchers and writers who documented the lives and careers of Muddy and his cohorts. While working on this book, I was never without the pressure of time: a month after I met Jimmy Rogers, he found out he had cancer, and a few months later, he was dead. Junior Wells followed weeks thereafter.

  For Muddy’s voice, I relied heavily on several key interviews, graciously provided by Peter Guralnick, Jim O’Neal and
Amy van Singel, Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall (on file at the Memphis–Shelby County Public Library and Information Center), Link Wyler and Russ Ragsdale (provided by Richard Chalk), the estate of Pete Welding, Charles Shaar Murray, and Paul Oliver. Also, Paul Trynka, John Brisbin, Larry Lasker, Nadine Cohodas, Matt Sakakeeny, Stanley Booth, and Jas Obrecht were kind enough to share their interviews of Muddy’s cohorts with me. I drew from many other printed interviews, all cited herein. Reading interviews with Muddy for more than five years, I saw many of the same questions asked of him repeatedly. I have documented the instances when I have combined answers from different interviews on the same subjects.

  Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from the following people come from my interviews: Terry Abrahamson, Goldie Abram, Georges Adins, Billy Boy Arnold, Mary Austin, Chris Barber, Bruce Bastin, Bill Bentley, Elvin Bishop, Joe Boyd, R. L. Burnside, Scott Cameron, Marshall Chess, Francis Clay, Amelia “Cookie” Cooper, Pete Cosey, James Cotton, Freddie Crutchfield, Terry Cryer, Chuck D., Carl Dugger, Esmond Edwards, Honeyboy Edwards, Mary Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Buddy Guy, Levon Helm, Magnolia Hunter, Pete Hunter, Manuel Jackson Jr., Calvin Jones, Mike Kappus, Robert Koester, Alan Lomax, Pee Wee Madison, Bob Margolin, Lucille McClenton, Bob Messinger, Bill Morganfield, Elve Morganfield, Joseph Morganfield, Marva Morganfield, Mercy Della Morganfield, Robert Morganfield, Jimmy Lee Morris, Charles Shaar Murray, Charlie Musselwhite, Dave Myers, Mark Naftalin, Nate Notkin, Jim O’Neal, Paul Oliver, Paul Oscher, Harold and Barbara Pendleton, Pinetop Perkins, Al Perry, Sylvia Pitcher, Jerry Portnoy, Barbara Purro, Keith Richards, Beulah Richardson, Richard “Harmonica Slim” Riggins, Jimmy Rogers, Bobby Rush, Otis Rush, Dick Shurman, Willie Smith, Little Smokey Smothers, Andrew “A. W.” Stephenson, Bobby Stovall, Willie Strandberg, Dick Waterman, Marie Stovall Webster, Norma Weiland, Frank Weston, Charles “Bang Bang” Williams, Val Wilmer, Johnny Winter, and Bill Wyman.

  INTRODUCTION

  xiii “They done found out I’m sellin’ whiskey”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”

  xiii “I went there, I said, ‘Yassuh?’ ”: Ibid.

  xiii “I couldn’t figure it out”: Ibid.

  xiii “I couldn’t handle this white man”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

  xiii “Same cup I drink out of”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, pp. 234–235.

  xiv “He brought his machine”: Ibid., p. 234.

  xv “We got his stuff out of the trunk”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”

  xv “So I just went along”: Jones, Melody Maker.

  xv “When he played back the first song”: Palmer, “The Delta Sun.”

  xv “Man, I can sing”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.

  xviii “I wanted to get out of Mississippi”: Guralnick, Home, p. 67.

  xix “I been in the blues all of my life”: Harris, Liner notes to Otis Spann’s Bottom of the Blues.

  1: MANNISH BOY 1913–1925

  Muddy’s Father: Ollie Morganfield and Berta Grant never married. Ollie’s first wife was named Sissy, and their son was Freddy. Ollie later married Gertrude Crayton and had ten more children: Dave, Ollie Jr., Robert, Matthew, and Ellis were the boys; Luella, Mary, Gertrude, Fannie, and Annie were the girls. “He sharecropped and leased on Magnolia Plantation till 1947, then he moved closer to Rolling Fork,” Robert Morganfield told me. “When he retired, he was renting somebody else’s land and farming cotton on it.” Muddy has been quoted as saying he was born on the Kroger Plantation. The interviewer probably misunderstood Muddy: Kroger was the name of the farm manager on the Magnolia Plantation.

  The “long-lived resident” mentioned on page 3 was named Beulah Richardson, whom I met while knocking on doors looking for old people near Jug’s Corner. In 1933, Beulah Richardson hired Ollie to play a Christmas breakfast at her home. She’d killed hogs, prepared meats, made sausages, and was fortified with “whiskey on up.” The party would have been a smash, with Ollie taking home five or six dollars, had she not stayed out the night before carousing and riding in a convertible. “I had pneumonia by morning. The doctor came and saw all that food, said, ‘Someone’s going to have to fix me something to eat.’ And he sat and ate before he tended to me.” She had no memory of Muddy’s mother or grandmother.

  Stovall Plantation, and Cotton: Stovall was — and is — a 4,500-acre plantation; it’s actually the Belmont, Waterloo, Prairie, and West End plantations combined. That’s a substantial territory, with its own mule barn, hay barn, dairy barn, and a blacksmith shop the size of a barn. It sits on Oak Ridge, next to the Mississippi River, and follows the bank of the Little Sunflower River, a flood stream. The Stovall land nearer the river is some of the Delta’s finest.

  During high water, flood streams take the Mississippi’s water — and all its silt, sand, and collected topsoil — and dump it on the high bank. The water drains away from the flood stream to a drainage stream; the heavy sandy soil is dumped first, and the finer silt is carried further. Sandy loam (the ice cream soil) produces the best cotton; the heavier soil is called buckshot, so named because its clay content makes pellets hard enough to shoot. (At the time of the great flood of 1927, rows had been cut into the fields by mules. A flood in 1995 carried away much of the sandy topsoil, and the rows in the buckshot ground from 1927, and the mule tracks, were still evident.)

  Stovall was timberland when originally settled by Colonel John Oldham in the 1840s. The Choctaw had cleared one area and were raising corn, and they cleared a track nearby for pony races. Oldham named his farm Prairie Plantation. When his great-grandson-in-law, Colonel William Howard Stovall, inherited the land around the time Muddy and his grandmother arrived, the Stovall Plantation had grown to its full size. In a 1930 aerial photograph of Stovall, the oval shape of the pony track is still evident in the fields. (“Neither my daddy or grandmother sold off or bought much property,” said Bobby Stovall, who was raised there.)

  “My daddy used to ride a horse all over the plantation, he never rode a truck,” Marie Stovall Webster said about Colonel Stovall. “He’d be out till at least seven o’clock at night.” Some people have reported that signals on Mississippi plantations were sent across fields by blowing on conch shells, but Bobby Stovall found that laughable. “Signals like that would have been given with a cow’s horn. They were also used in fox hunts, and for cows. Most everyone I knew could blow one. Where the fuck are they going to find a conch shell in the Mississippi Delta?”

  Over time, mechanization increased. In addition to the technological advancements, the transition from hand labor was also influenced by the enforcement of minimum wage in the Delta. “After that, you couldn’t afford to chop cotton,” said Norma Weiland, today’s office manager at Stovall Farms. “When you were paying thirty cents an hour, it was a lot different than when you were paying two and three dollars an hour. You could pay the children lesser wages and the minute they changed all that, the children ended up being left at home. The farmer could not afford it. Farmers had to take advantage of the technology to stay in business.”

  Pete Hunter, Stovall’s contemporary farm manager, explained, “It gradually transformed from sharecropping to where the farm had all the mules, harnesses, etcetera, kept them in one area, and these people were paid so much a day or an hour. I can remember during the midfifties, in the era of tractors, a person hoeing or chopping cotton was paid two dollars a day, and a person driving a tractor was paid four dollars a day. Money was paid in cash out the window of a pickup at the end of the day.”

  Norma continued, “Everyone says farmers are the biggest gamblers of all. I’m not sure they’re not the biggest fools of all. If you were going to put a pencil to it, no way would you invest the amount of money it takes to grow a crop with the hope of a return so little. Why do people farm? It provides them with a way of life. It gets in your blood, you have to watch things grow.”

  It’s said to be just coincidental that 1916 was the year of both Mississippi’s first boll weevil
infestation and the inauguration of infamous, racist governor Theodore G. Bilbo.

  4 Born October 20, 1890: This date comes from a military ID issued to Ollie in 1961. For the 1920 census, taken in April, Ollie listed his age at his last birthday as twenty-eight, indicating a birth year of 1891.

  4 There is no record of Berta: Berta Grant has been virtually erased from history. When researching her, I also tried other names associated with the Grant family: Preece (and its various spellings) and Jones.

  4 April 4, 1913: According to the 1940 census, John Work’s treatise (Fisk Archives), Alan Lomax’s notes (Lomax Archives), and the Lewis Jones manuscript (Fisk Archives), Muddy’s birth year was 1913.

  4 at least twelve years old: Assuming the age of childbearing begins at twelve, if Berta were born to a twelve-year-old Della, she was twenty when she had Muddy; if Berta was twelve when she conceived Muddy, she was born in 1901.

  4 McKinley A. Morganfield: Middle initial per Lomax correspondence, January 27, 1942, though I’ve never seen the initial used anywhere else.

  6 The Delta had been a swampy jungle: Joe Willie Wilkins said that one night, while his father was out playing music, he and his mother were “home alone when a panther smelled food cooking and tried to enter the house through the cat entrance in the door. He could only get a paw in; Mrs. Wilkins cut it off with an axe.” (Hay, “Wilkins,” p. 8.)

  6 three sons: Ollie’s brother Lewis Morganfield wound up on Stovall; he became a preacher, and raised a family there and later in Clarksdale. Eddie Morganfield died before he was thirty. “He was happy-go-lucky,” said his nephew Elve.