114 “This is where the soul of man never dies”: Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 233.
115 “At one time there was a wide gulf”: Gart, First Pressings Vol. 2.
115 major labels began jockeying for position: Paramount first revived Okeh Records, dormant a decade, in the spring of 1951 to compete in the R&B world. Soon after, Paramount wrested Okeh’s distribution from several of its company-owned branches and delivered it to area independents.
115 “We were sitting down”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.
115 “We would build it and then”: Walters, Garman, and Matthews, “Jimmy Rogers.”
115 “At the time we called it the jam”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.
116 “If you couldn’t play that song”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”
116 “All my best records”: Lindemann, “Little Walter and Louis Myers.”
116 “He said, ‘What’s that?’ ”: Brisbin interview with Jimmy Rogers.
117 “Little Walter flashes”: Gart, First Pressings Vol. 2.
117 “When we got back to the hotel”: Brisbin interview with Jimmy Rogers.
118 Shaw Artists: The agency was founded in early 1949 by Billy Shaw, who was working as a booking agent for Charlie Parker and other bebop artists; he’d been VP of Moe Gale Agency and resigned to start Shaw Artists. (Howlin’ Wolf was with the Gale Agency in the 1950s.)
118 “You wasn’t at no blues joint”: O’Neal, “Junior Wells,” p. 12.
118 “from one end of the line”: Ibid., p. 119.
119 “I raised Junior Wells”: Gelms interview with Muddy Waters.
119 “Every time we’d look around”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
119 “We was running in and out of town”: Walters, Garman, and Matthews, “Jimmy Rogers.”
120 “If somebody can shine”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
8: HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN 1953–1955
Muddy and Wolf: Not only did Muddy host Wolf, but he also helped him get a band together. Drummer Earl Phillips remembered Muddy coming to his gig: “Muddy came by there one evening and says to me, ‘How about getting with my man and help him, and you can go somewhere?’ Just like that, Muddy did. I goes over on Greenwood Street to see Howlin’ Wolf. This was in 1954. And he got to talking and he decided he wanted me to work with him. So we started rehearsing, sometimes in Muddy Waters’s basement because Spann used to be with us sometimes.” (Cushing, “Behind the Beat.”) In the early 1960s, Little Smokey Smothers played with Wolf and also sat in with Muddy on guitar. “Somebody would always tell Wolf and he’d say, ‘I heard you been hanging with them Muddy Waters boys. Them ain’t nothing but drunks. I don’t want my guys hanging with them guys.’ ” Calvin Jones, who also played with Wolf for several years before joining Muddy, doesn’t recall Wolf ever making such demands. The documentation of the union conflict between Muddy and Wolf was found by Scott Dirks in the papers of Local 208, archived in the Music Research Department of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. I know of two Wolf biographies and two documentaries in the works.
Arc Publishing: When short on money, many artists — not understanding the long-term value of their work or unwilling to gamble that its value would rise — sold their rights to the publisher. Marshall told me: “Publishers often helped out their clients by buying songs from them. Goodman bought some songs from Memphis Slim. There are letters in the file from Memphis Slim thanking him. Arc had bought the Jimmy Reed catalog, and years and years later they did a lawsuit against Arc. So we hired a detective to find Jimmy Reed’s lawyer from that time, we knew his name. He’s retired in Florida, gives us a sworn affidavit that not only the Reeds needed the money, the IRS was going to take everything, they were thrilled, they were kissing feet for being able to get the money.”
Arc Music’s original domain was only international rights and versions of Chess artists’ songs remade by people outside the company. Domestic publishing stayed within Chess; that is, instead of Chess paying Arc and Arc paying the Chess artists, the record company paid itself. The artists received nothing, or nothing like what they were supposed to receive, until they began filing lawsuits against Arc in the 1970s.
Band Personnel: Little George Smith was soon to be George “Harmonica” Smith. In the early 1950s, while working as a film projectionist in Itta Benna, Mississippi, Smith discovered that he could remove the machine’s amplifier and speaker and play his harmonica through them; on his own, he’d developed a style similar to Little Walter’s. He was leading a little band, but he leapt at the chance to join Muddy Waters, quitting his day job as a janitor at the Twentieth-Century Theater. Days, Spann went through the drill with George Smith, and they were so busy at night that he was quickly on top of the songs.
Joining Muddy’s band was the fulfillment of James Cotton’s dreams. “I was married to this woman, Ceola,” he told me, “and she bought me a record player and every record that Little Walter and Muddy had ever made. She used to get up in the morning time, write me a note, leave me ten dollars on the record player. ‘Learn this song.’ She knew Muddy’s songs better than I did. And when I’d play, she’d say, ‘Well, you missed that part there.’ ” Ceola’s regimen served Cotton well; when he joined Muddy, he was instructed to play the harp parts as they’d been recorded. “The blues didn’t get too low-down for us,” Cotton continued. “We didn’t stand back from any musicians.” In June of 1955, Muddy battled Ray Charles, the blind keyboardist who took his blues roots in a more jazzy, orchestral direction, at the Trianon Ballroom, a lavish South Side dance palace that had only recently begun allowing black patrons to enter. The house was packed, the gate was a record, and the battle was a tie. The Trianon scheduled a rematch. The verse James Cotton contributed to “Rocket 88” begins: “V-8 motor and this smart design . . .”
Music was changing in 1955 and Muddy’s lineup was affected. Through the rock and roll of Bill Haley and Little Richard, the saxophone was enjoying a revival, honking and shouting its modernity. (Haley’s 1956 hit, “See You Later Alligator,” was written and originally performed by Chess’s Bobby Charles and brought Arc a substantial payment.) Straight blues, deep blues, no longer satisfied a full house. “We was playing them black dances and it’s kind of hard just to play a dance with a harmonica and guitars,” said Muddy. “I added on a horn or so, and we could play at a club and dance, too.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) Muddy went through several players — Bob Hadley, Eddie Shaw, a Memphis player named Adolph “Billy” Duncan, J. T. Brown, Earl Brown, Bobby Fields, and Marcus Johnson, who also doubled on bass; Johnson played neither instrument expertly, but he kept Muddy’s cars washed. Bob Hadley was not a good traveler; his legs tended to swell. He soon became a plainclothes detective and slept nights in his own bed.
122 “The piano is made for both hands”: Hentoff, Liner notes to Otis Spann.
122 “I put a little swing into [the blues]”: Cushing, “Behind the Beat.”
123 “There was quite a few people around singing the blues”: WKCR newsletter.
123 “I was in the men’s house”: Robert Frank Gelms, Illinois Entertainer, June 1983.
124 “Oh man, the people went crazy”: Ibid.
124 “He done it two or three times that night”: Brisbin interview with Jimmy Rogers.
124 “Hoochie Coochie Man”: Benjamin Filene, in Romancing the Folk (pp. 105–106), offers this interpretation of “Hoochie Coochie Man” ’s success:
To these migrants, Dixon’s songs offered some of the same consolation that Waters’s statements of yearning in “I Feel Like Going Home” had provided for earlier settlers. Joining familiar down-home holdovers with new urban styles, the tunes achieved formally the sort of juxtaposition that the migrants themselves were grappling with in their own lives. To hear evocations of their southern customs in the context of the vibrantly urban sound appealed to their longing for all they had left behind and their eagerness to merge the old and new. . . .
Dixon’s songs could appeal to newcomers from the South, but his language and imagery suggest that he was primarily speaking for and to migrants who had been settled in the North longer.
124 “We’re so happy with Muddy”: Gart, First Pressings Vol. 4, p. 20.
125 four thousand copies: Ibid., p. 21.
128 Muddy’s move brought Leola: Cookie remarked on the relationship between Muddy, Geneva, and Leola: “Geneva really accepted my grandmother. I was raised that that was our network. Geneva was my grandmother’s best friend. She would have Bo or anyone go pick her up. They would spend the weekends together, do the shopping. When Muddy really started out there cheating and stuff, that’s who she would confide in. They were really good friends. If Muddy was going out of town, Leola would stay with Geneva. I never saw them have bad words toward each other. Muddy would go by Leola’s and she would cook for him. They had a competition of cooking.” Muddy’s move to the South Side brought Geneva’s mother, known as M’dear, to Forty-first and Greenwood. Geneva and Cookie visited her regularly. “Muddy always made sure that M’dear had whatever she needed,” said Cookie. “Not that he would deliver it, but he would have someone to do it.”
128 “I had Chicago sewed up”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
128 “I know the peoples thought we hated”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
129 “I’d say this is a song for Muddy”: Dixon with Snowden, I Am the Blues, p. 149.
130 It was yellow and green: Some people recall the first car Leonard gave Muddy as red.
130 “Chess would get him a car”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.
131 “So I got him home”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun,” p. 25.
132 “you couldn’t get a job without a harmonica player”: Rowe, Chicago Blues, p. 88.
132 “Are you ready?”: Tooze, Muddy Waters, p. 125.
133 “Willie Dixon got credit”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.
133 “Pop Music Rides R&B Tidal Wave”: Gart, First Pressings Vol. 4.
134 “I had done got Junior”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
136 Band members earned: For a sense of what a club would have paid in 1959, contracts show Wolf was paid a $250 guarantee for him plus a band of four, with further payments of half the gate over $500.
138 The South was where racism held: Louis Myers was traveling with Walter in the 1950s. “I went in this place in Atlanta and I was just looking for a guitar and he said, ‘Don’t put your black hands on all the guitars up and down this line.’ And I said, ‘I’m just looking for a guitar.’ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We got white peoples coming in to buy guitars.’ ” (Lindemann, “Little Walter and Louis Myers.”)
138 The South was also home: Robert Morganfield said, “He got back in touch, started to visiting with us, and we started visiting him. Always when he would come, he would make our sister Luella’s home his stay place. He loved her biscuits and the way she made steaks. He’d visit around a couple days, then be gone.”
139 “Somebody with a gun”: Baysting, “Bluesman.”
139 Lake Park Liqueors: Spelling as per Chicago telephone directory.
140 Nate Notkin: “One of the songs that made Muddy famous, I’m gonna put my tiger in your tank, he put his tiger in a lot of tanks. There was one case that stands out. This was a beautiful woman, she was married, she claimed that Muddy was the father, and that there wasn’t any chance it was anybody else. So we got on two telephones in my office. Muddy said, ‘Hey babe, how about if I come over now?’ She said, ‘Oh, my husband is home.’ When it came to trial, I had an associate representing Muddy so I could be a witness. She had, as further proof that Muddy was the father, a notarized statement by Muddy acknowledging paternity. Well, Muddy couldn’t read or write, except for his name, which was a hell of a job for him. The notarial public seal was there, but no ‘subscribed and sworn’ or the date, just the seal. She tried to introduce that in evidence, and the assistant state’s attorney — it’s a quasi-criminal charge — said this notary is a cousin of mine. So the case was continued until the cousin was brought in. He was a used-car salesman. She came to buy a car, she was in his office alone while he went out to attend to some other customer, and while he was gone for five minutes, she evidently used his notarial seal. The judge threw the case out.”
Notkin also quashed a rumor that persisted, and took various forms, throughout my research. I heard several times that Muddy (sometimes it was Jimmy) ran over a child, possibly while driving drunk. Notkin said he never heard of it. “If Muddy had been involved, I’m sure I would have heard. He trusted me with his life.”
141 “Muddy was kind of jealous”: Louis Myers, Little Walter’s guitarist, told Dick Shurman that one night he stopped in at the 708 Club on his way home. Muddy was playing. Louis saw a childhood sweetheart and didn’t know she was Muddy’s girlfriend. They embraced and chatted excitedly, unaware that Muddy was watching from the bandstand, stewing. Later, Myers was watching the sun come up from his front porch when a car came screaming around the corner. He watched, amazed, as it halted in front of his house. Muddy jumped out, holding a gun, saying, “I’ll kill you, you motherfucker.” Louis hastened, “Wait. Wait. Wait,” and explained the old friendship.
141 “Only a few artists”: Gart, First Pressings Vol. 5.
141 “Mannish Boy”: The spelling on the original release was “Manish Boy.” Unlike the suggested transformation of the man in the evolved spelling of Muddy’s name, this seems to be simply a mistake.
142 “Muddy wanted to take ‘I’m a Man’ ”: Trynka interview with Billy Boy Arnold.
142 “Bo Diddley, he was tracking me”: Bill Dahl, “Muddy Waters Reigns As King,” Illinois Entertainer, May 1981.
Diddley’s “I’m a Man” features Otis Spann on piano. Change did not come quickly at Chess. Leonard — and Muddy — did not mind stasis. “Evil,” which soon followed “Mannish Boy,” reworked the formula of “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Earlier, after the success of “I Feel Like Going Home,” Muddy had cut both “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “Walkin’ Blues,” which were built on the same melody.
142 “some things come out all different”: Obrecht, “Bluesman.”
9: THE BLUES HAD A BABY 1955–1958
Jimmy Rogers Retires: Even while blues greats were leaving the field, new ones were entering, and this second generation was profoundly shaped by Muddy. His heavy, declamatory vocals were the model for singers such as Big Boy Spires and Floyd Jones. Otis Rush, whose harrowing singing and playing on 1956’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby” announced a major talent, named Muddy as his inspiration. The reason he wasn’t on Chess, the musicians knew, was because Leonard found him too close to Muddy in style.
Hubert Sumlin: Hubert Sumlin played with Muddy from May or June until sometime in December 1956. He began meeting with Spann in Muddy’s basement. “Spann and I would work for two hours down there every day. He learned me a lot, man. Muddy wouldn’t even pick up a guitar while I was with him.” (Trynka interview with Hubert Sumlin.) He recalled his trek to Chicago: “[Wolf] calls up, tells me the train leaves at so and so time and you are going to be met by Otis Spann. I packed my little suitcase, gets on the train, and finally arrives at the big ol’ Illinois Station on Twelfth Street. Otis Spann met me, man, I got to see all these big lights, and I got scared, so we went straight back to Leonard Chess’s daddy’s apartment building. Wolf had his own apartment there, he got me an apartment there and had done got my union card and everything. So the second day, me and Wolf we done had lunch, and he starts to telling me how this worked, how that worked.” (Trynka, “Howlin’ Wolf,” p. 44.)
Later, when Hubert joined Muddy, “We were coming back from Florida, Spann had stopped and bought him a pistol — Saturday Night Special. So we all bought them. I got me a little old gun, it just fit in my coat. We had made it almost back to Chicago, Muddy had went on — he always did drive separate with his chauffeur. The police pulled our car over. He got Sp
ann out of the car and come up with his gun, so then he hauled us all out. They pulled a gun from every man in that car. They called for another car, kept their guns on us the whole time. They thought they had captured the black mafia or something, and we all got thrown away in jail. We’d be there today without Muddy. He came down as soon as he found out and made them let us go. But they kept the guns.” (Trynka interview with Hubert Sumlin.) Hubert went back to Wolf, and they enjoyed an eight-year run of hits, carrying a black audience into the 1960s well after Muddy’s had faded and his appeal was mostly to whites.
“Elgin” Edmonds Gets Fired: “I had to find me a drummer that would drive,” said Muddy. “My drummer was straight right down — bop bop bop bop. I had to part from him ’cause he just couldn’t hit the backbeat.” (Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 168.) Freddie Below, the obvious replacement, was making it in the Chess studio and, any time he needed the road work, his commitment was with Walter. Cotton remembered the group running through five or six drummers before finding Clay. “It was funny to me,” Cotton said, “because all the other drummers brought their whole set of drums, Clay come to audition with just a snare drum.” But Clay said, “No, I didn’t audition.” Marcus Johnson, whom some band members called “Marcus Garvey” because of his politics, got in a fight and out of the band. According to Cotton, “Marcus thought that Clay owed him something because he got him into the band. We played Gary, Indiana, one night, we loaded the instruments into the back of the station wagon, and Marcus knocked Clay down. And I gave Marcus a good whupping for it.” Said Clay, “He’d get hot-headed sometimes.” Clay also did not care for Triplett: “Pat Hare was always a pleasant person, but he loved to play with guns. He would have his gun on his bed, taking it apart, putting it together. He got in trouble one time in Texas, he shot at Triplett, who was an asshole anyway. He irritated everyone. He thought he was out of this world. The cops came, but they didn’t arrest anyone, they were used to things like that.”
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