Entering the Chicago Music Scene: When Muddy arrived in Chicago, the recording industry was crippled by more than the Petrillo ban. Charlie Gillett, in The Sound of the City (p. 8), notes: “In April of 1942, the War Production Board had ordered a 79 percent reduction in the nonmilitary use of shellac and implemented a regulation which required the exchange of old records for every one purchased. To survive the shortage, the six major record companies, Columbia, Victor, Mercury, Decca, Capitol, and MGM, concentrated almost exclusively on the predominantly white popular music market.” (See also Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: 1877–1977.)
When Muddy eventually found club gigs, the money was not extraordinary. According to contracts discovered by Jim O’Neal dating between 1942 and 1944, Memphis Slim and Big Bill Broonzy were paid seven dollars and seventy-five cents each for midnight shows at the Indiana Theater. The pair split thirty dollars for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights for four months at Ruby’s Tavern, and Slim alone, for five nights a week at Rudy’s Chicken Palace, took home thirty-six dollars a week. Broonzy was prominent at the time. Jimmy Rogers said about him: “I really admired him, hair stand on my head to see that man. Big Bill gave me a lot of points on what was going down in this blues field.” (Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Muddy told McKee and Chisenhall that he met Broonzy in 1944, the same year he met Memphis Slim, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy I, and Lee Brown. “I played with Lee Brown after ‘Bobbie Town Boogie’ came out,” Muddy told O’Neal and van Singel. “It was sellin’ pretty good, but it wasn’t sellin’ much as he played it. He did ‘Bobbie Town Boogie’ four times a night! It wasn’t but just him and [guitarist] Baby Face Leroy and me. That’s where I met Baby Face Leroy. We didn’t even have a drum, not the biggest part of the time. Lee Brown introduced me to a record agent, Mayo Williams.” Williams got Muddy on his first Chicago session.
Muddy’s early repertoire included two Big Joe Turner hits, 1940’s “Piney Brown Blues” and the next year’s “Corrine, Corrina.” (Muddy recorded his own version of the latter on his Woodstock album.) His voice, though gruffer than Turner’s, was as big, and both were declamatory. The slow drag of Turner’s “Piney Brown Blues” suited Muddy’s mercurial manner; it was a staple of his repertoire around the Delta and a favorite for his audience when he got to Chicago. He told Living Blues, “I used to sing good ‘Piney Brown.’ ‘I been to Kansas City, everything is really all right.’ I used to drown that, man, I used to put that in water and drown it.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) He may have been singing that song the night that Calvin Jones stumbled onto him in Chicago at the Boogie Woogie Inn, Roosevelt and Paulina. Calvin remembered the harp player was not Walter and not Jimmy. Muddy told O’Neal and van Singel, “Little Johnnie Jones used to play harp with me too, the piano player.” Muddy and Johnny (on piano) later recorded together for Aristocrat.
Stories about the formation of the early band abound. In addition to the account at the end of Chapter 5, the following elements of evolution also seem credible. Muddy told Charles Murray, “Then Blue Smitty left us and Jimmy got a job, and this left me by myself. I got a guy named Baby Face Leroy. He played drums and guitar, but he and I was playing git-tars together.” (Murray, Shots, p. 184.) He told Bill Dahl in the Illinois Entertainer, “Me and Baby Face Leroy started to playing. He played guitar. We said, ‘Hey! We need another piece.’ And we went and found Walter and got him to come with us. Then Jimmy Rogers came back to the band. That made four of us.” (Bill Dahl, “Muddy Waters Reigns As King,” Illinois Entertainer, May 1981.)
Jimmy elaborated on his business relationship with Muddy in the early days: “Muddy as a boss,” Jimmy told Paul Trynka, “we got along real good. Only thing he was short on was asking people for money. And Muddy was a kind of shy guy of big cities — he wouldn’t get around too much. He’d talk to people if they talked to him, he’d go to work, come home, and that was it. Chicago to me was just another big city. I’d been around Memphis and places, and I knew you had to stay on your toes and watch the people you associate with.” (Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.)
When Muddy met Lester Melrose, for whom he cut his second Chicago sessions, Melrose was at the end of a long run of success. He’d entered the music business selling instruments, sheet music, and records, but soon grasped that the money was in publishing. By developing connections with performers, he became a talent scout and record producer, his control of the sessions furthering his publishing interests. Over time, with one man overseeing so much of the recording, his sound developed a certain sameness. The scene was changing around him, in front of him, but he was too entrenched in the old sounds to see it. (See Koester, “Melrose.”)
67 “I was thinking to myself”: Welding, “An Interview.”
67 “The Great Northern Drive”: The editorial ran on October 7, 1916, cited in Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis, p. 134. The statistical information comes from Rowe, Chicago Blues.
67 “I went straight to Chicago”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
68 “If there was no one to meet [the arriving passengers]”: Spear, Black Chicago, p. 147. This quote is also cited in Mike Rowe’s Chicago Blues.
69 “I had some people there”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 236; McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
69 “the heaviest jive you ever saw in your life”: Rooney, Bossmen, p. 109.
69 “Work there eight hours a day”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 236.
69 “During the last war”: Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 91.
69 “I never did go get good jobs”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 237.
69 “I got a job at the paper mill”: Oliver, Conversation.
70 “tell this man at the [draft] board”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, pp. 236–237.
70 “The blues Waters found”: Welding, “American Original.”
70 “The vigorous, country-based blues”: Welding, “Afro Mud.”
71 “My blues still was the sad, old-time blues”: Welding, “An Interview.”
71 “You’d go in”: Rooney, Bossmen, p. 110.
71 “I played mostly on weekends”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 237; McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
72 Dan Jones: His address was 1857 West Thirteenth Street.
72 “I call my style country style”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
73 “You done made hits”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 237.
73 “she was a Christian-type woman”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers,” p. 11.
74 “They was men then”: Ibid.
Rogers remembers meeting and playing with Sonny Boy II, but places it around 1939 or 1940. He attributes the radio show, however, as his reason for seeking him, so it must have been after November 1941.
74 “small change”: Ibid, p. 12.
74 “My favorite men”: Ibid.
74 “I could feel [racism]”: Melish, “The Man.”
In an excellent Living Blues cover story about Jimmy Rogers in 1997, “I’m Havin’ Fun Right Today,” author John Brisbin mishears Rogers say that a “state senator” brought Muddy to his house. “There wasn’t no senator that drove him over there,” Rogers told me. “He came over there with somebody that Jesse knew.”
74 “started jamming over at his house”: Rowe, Chicago Blues, p. 67.
74 “I knew what I was listening for”: Melish, “The Man.”
75 “I just harmonize it”: Author interview with Jimmy Rogers.
75 “nobody home but us musicians”: Ibid.
75 “start this house-party deal”: Rowe, Chicago Blues, p. 67.
75 “One night it was raining”: O’Neal, “Blue Smitty” part 1.
76 “I went down in Jewtown”: Ibid.
77 “He really learnt me some things”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
77 “It was a very, very good improvement”: Wheeler, “Waters–Winter Interview.”
77 “I was playing with Smitty”: Voce, “Jimmy Rogers.”
77 “If Blue Smitty wasn’t there”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun.”
78 “We’d call it scabbing”: Rowe, Chicago Blues, p. 49.
78 “So one day I was going to get a haircut”: O’Neal, “Blue Smitty” part 2.
Muddy told Pete Welding the tavern was at Polk and Ogden Streets on the West Side.
79 “We were playing our little clubs”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
79 “My uncle Joe [Grant]”: Oliver, Conversation.
79 “It wasn’t no name-brand”: Murray, Shots, p. 182.
79 “It was a very different sound”: Obrecht, “Bluesman.”
79 “He wanted me to play like Johnny Moore”: Welding, “An Interview.”
80 “He got his paycheck”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun,” p. 21.
80 “Musicians, blues players”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”
80 “He had that particular little twinkle”: Obrecht, “Bluesman.”
81 “Why don’t you sing one”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
82 “I remember that session”: O’Neal, “Muddy’s First.”
83 “When we discovered what was going down, then I said, ‘Wow, man! We got something here!’ ”: N.p., n.d.
84 “That country stuff might sound funny to ’em”: Obrecht, “Life and Times.”
84 vaulted for almost a quarter century: Muddy’s Lester Melrose tracks were first released in 1972, on Pete Welding’s Testament LP, Chicago Blues: The Beginning.
84 “You gotta have something”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
84 “People interested in people selling”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
6: ROLLIN’ AND TUMBLIN’ 1947–1950
More on the Band’s Formative Years: Honeyboy Edwards gives a great account of Walter’s arrival in Chicago, after falling in with him in St. Louis: “We had heard about Maxwell Street. That was where the happening was. Musicians come to Chicago from everywhere just to play on Maxwell Street. They could make a living there. [Walter and I] hitchhiked from East St. Louis to Decatur, Illinois. So we hit the streets in Decatur, and found a little whiskey house and played a while there. Then we played at that train station, Walter playing that harp loud. I had my guitar and little amplifier. And we made enough at that station to buy tickets to ride to Chicago. We rode the cushions!” (Edwards, The World, p. 150.) When Jimmy went outside to hear Walter, a rainstorm sent them scurrying to Jimmy’s nearby apartment. Walter went home wearing Jimmy’s dry clothes. “He’d come to my house every day,” Rogers said, “wake me up. We’d talk and sit down and rehearse.” (Melish, “The Man.”)
Though no one else was home when Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter began rehearsing at Muddy’s, they “wouldn’t never blast the volume,” Jimmy told me. “The distortion would get in the way. You keep it down where each individual can just about hear where the next one’s going.” He told Jas Obrecht that music “was the most serious thing that I had going in my life. Every day we would do that. We’d meet over at Muddy’s house. I could walk from my house to Muddy’s in about ten minutes. It was a long ways to walk, but it wasn’t worth paying a streetcar fare to ride down there.” (Obrecht interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Jimmy Rogers lived at Twelfth and Peoria, twelve blocks from Thirteenth and Ashland.
There are many variations on the story of Muddy getting to his first session. One excuse Muddy remembered giving to his superiors was that his cousin had been found dead in an alley. Also, some versions have Muddy stopping at home and learning of the session, and turning over the truck and the rest of the deliveries to his childhood friend Andrew “Bo” Bolton (Bo is the mysterious “Antra Bolton” mentioned in Rowe’s Chicago Blues). It probably was not Geneva with whom Sunnyland conspired because it’s unlikely Muddy had met her yet. (In the 1955 Chicago Defender he stated he was already successfully recording when they met. [Alfred Duckett and Muddy Waters, “We Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” Chicago Defender, March 26, 1955.]) The versions that have Muddy driving his uncle’s coal truck or driving a junk truck for Chess seem to be plain misunderstandings.
John Brisbin, who specializes in extended articles written in his interviewee’s own words (a genre requiring persistence and patience), got the following from Sunnyland Slim, who was notorious for confusing stories:
A visitor found patience rewarded when, out of Sunnyland’s whispery mists, came a clear, comprehensible version of that story, told as if it happened yesterday: “Leonard Chess and Phil Chess, they wanted me to make this record. They wanted me to bring one of them old soul guitar players. I tried to get ’em one, get ’em Lee Cooper or Johnny Shines. Couldn’t do it. My wife said, ‘What the hell. Why don’t you go and get somebody to make the record ’cause the man done left the paper there.’ It was eighty-two dollars, union. . . . So I went and paid nine cents streetcar fare. Bessie didn’t have but fifty-four cents to give me. I went over to Eighteenth Street and met Bo, Muddy’s cousin. And I never will forget. We went on back to Canal Street. Muddy wasn’t there see, but we talked to his boss. We told a lie. I said my daddy was fixin’ to die, Muddy’s mother was a little sick. We just conned the boss so we could get Muddy off the next day. . . . The man went for it. I played for a show that night. Big Crawford, Muddy, and I. It sounded so good. Muddy sounded good, good! We went to the studio the next day and Leonard Chess asked me, ‘Hey man, can your partner sing?’ I said, ‘Sure, man. Set it up!’ You know, to help Muddy out. But, you see, the thing were we had to square up things ’cause Muddy wasn’t in the union. We had to go through some changes, you know, to get him in.” (Brisbin, “Sunnyland Slim,” p. 54)
Blue Smitty, however, remembered being taken to the union, with Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, by Eddie Boyd in the mid-1940s.
Jimmy Rogers remembered Big Crawford fondly. “He was the nicest guy. He was a big and tall guy — weighed about three hundred-and-some pounds and stood about six feet five inches. He was a huge guy, like Willie Dixon. I’d see him all the time, and we would talk and crack jokes and fool around together.” (Obrecht interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Rogers also recalled Muddy’s reluctance to record without the band. Though solo country blues were popular — Lightnin’ Hopkins had sold well with his spare “Katie May,” Big Joe Williams was attracting attention, and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” was in the wind — Muddy “didn’t want to play by himself. Sunnyland kept urging him. At that time, his bills was kind of gettin’ high, his car note and he had to pay his rent. Muddy was kind of a tight guy with them pennies, man. So he tried it.” (Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun,” p. 23.)
Though Muddy and Jimmy continued to play in clubs together every week, two more years would pass before they would record together for Leonard. Jimmy, in conversation in his later years, spoke disparagingly of Leonard. (“Leonard was pretty slick,” he told me. “Those guys was gypping you as far as your money or taking your material.”) Jimmy signed to Apollo Records in New York in 1949, before finally acceding to Chess’s dominance in Chicago. (“[Chess] was too heavy. You couldn’t get no place unless you come through him.” [O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”]) For Baby Face Leroy, stardom never came — he liked music only when it was exciting. Though he would later record for the small Chicago label J.O.B., he mostly got out of music. By the decade’s end, he was dead from tuberculosis.
Early Success: “My earliest memory of Muddy is when we were living on the West Side,” said Charles “Bang Bang” Williams, Muddy’s stepson and Geneva’s second child, who was seven when his mother moved in with Muddy. “I came home from school, and he was listening to one of his records with a fella that lived across the street.” Geneva moved to Muddy’s with Charles; her other son Dennis soon came up from Mississippi, and Bo found his own place. Charles rode with Muddy on deliveries and remembers him preparing for gigs. “Muddy would slick his hair back, have bangs, the way black people used to wear their hair, tuxed
o grease. But he wouldn’t miss no days from work. I don’t think he stopped working on the venetian blinds truck until the early 1950s.”
Billy Boy Arnold, then an aspiring harmonica player selling newspapers in front of the South Side’s Persian Hotel (and later an accompanist to Bo Diddley and Fats Domino), remembered the heat around Muddy’s 1949 hit “Screamin’ and Cryin’.” “The Persian Ballroom was in there, and I saw all kinds of people there, Joe Louis, T-Bone Walker, I saw Ella Fitzgerald in the beauty shop getting her nails done. People were talking about ‘Screamin’ and Cryin’.’ Muddy was hot then. I spoke to him when he was getting out of the car. He had a pretty black convertible, nineteen forty-eight Buick. It was a sleek new car and I walked from his car to the Persian Hotel with him. I’d ask every man with a guitar did they know Sonny Boy. He said, ‘Yeah, Sonny Boy was my partner.’ I told him I played harmonica. He said, ‘Oh, that’s good, keep it up.’ ” Muddy told Billy Boy he was going in to talk to his manager; I’ve tried hard to positively identify who that might have been, and can only conjecture that it was Big Bill Hill, the disc jockey who also had an agency.
Muddy’s Stint in Helena: “We was just going down to be doing something,” Muddy told Living Blues. “We wasn’t going to stay down there, no way.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) Locals told me the band played Helena’s Owl Cafe, the Cotton Club in Forrest City, the opening of the New Roxy movie theater in Clarksdale, a schoolhouse in Coahoma County where dances were held, and Will McComb’s café on the same road as Muddy’s old Stovall home.
Muddy’s longtime Chicago gig at the Zanzibar had a heavy impact on the future of blues. One youngster who lived behind the club was future blues star Freddy King. He would slip in the side door, too young to be in there, to watch the band. “He was big and husky,” Jimmy Rogers told Living Blues (O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers”), “but was nothing but a boy. He’d sit right at the bar, next to me, watch every move I’d make on the guitar.” King later made Jimmy’s “That’s All Right” and “Walkin’ by Myself” part of his regular set. Otis Rush also had his blues epiphany at the Zanzibar. He was fourteen and visiting his sister in Chicago in 1948; she took him to see Muddy, and he decided, “This is what I want to do.”
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