Scott Dirks, researching union documents in the Music Research Department of Chicago’s Harold Washington Library, found these American Federation of Musicians minutes of January 16, 1958:
Members Elga Edmonds and McKinley Morganfield appeared before the Board as notified re: the claim of Edmonds against Morganfield for eighty-three dollars, representing seventy-five dollars for three days’ wages plus eight dollars transportation. Morganfield stated that he gave Edmonds a notice in Florida on November 24 and he played with the band until a day or two before he left Chicago for Cleveland. He explained to the Board that he definitely told Edmonds that he would not go to Cleveland. Edmonds stated that he had been given notices many times before but that they were always taken back by Morganfield. He figured that this would happen with the last notice. He also admitted that Morganfield did not want him to go to Cleveland. He explained that after talking to President Gray, he did drive to Cleveland under the impression that perhaps Morganfield had not been able to obtain the services of a drummer. When he arrived on the job, Morganfield was surprised, and, having a drummer, he would not let him play. Instead of him returning to Chicago the next morning, he stayed for three days and Morganfield gave him some money but not enough to buy gas and oil for the round-trip from Chicago. President Gray explained his position in the matter and stated that he simply tried to act as mediator in the case. After Edmonds telephoned him from Cleveland, he talked to Muddy Waters and asked him to pay Edmonds’s fare back to Chicago, which Morganfield agreed to do and gave him fifteen dollars. Edmonds stated that it cost him twelve dollars and seventeen cents each way, which included the price of gasoline and oil and turnpike fees. Muddy Waters agreed to pay an additional ten dollars to Edmonds as the balance due for transportation cost. On motion, the claim of member Elga Edmonds against member McKinley Morganfield was disallowed.
Francis Clay modernized Muddy’s sound, making it rhythmically more complex without losing its essential backbeat. “Clay, by him playing the beat, he was a help to me and Spann,” said Cotton. Blues and Rhythm wrote of Clay: “He was able to achieve more rhythmic flavor by doing such things as playing on the tom-toms and cymbals in unison with the melody, and also adding counter rhythms, all the while maintaining a basic backbeat on the bass and snare drums. Favors a small timbale-like tom-tom, used it for twenty years.” (Leadbitter, Nothing but the Blues, p. 109.)
Luther Tucker: The rotating guitar spot soon fell to Luther Tucker, whom Muddy stole from the increasingly erratic Little Walter. Tucker was in his early twenties and ready to kick ass. His fiery style was reflected by his personality: he’d been kicked out of Memphis, his hometown, as an adolescent, and had come to Chicago, where he promptly stole a police car and landed in a juvenile detention center. His mother, in tears, put him in the care of Sunnyland Slim, and another career was born. Tucker’s playing was fluid, and his solos slithered like wet snakes. He and Hare gave Muddy a sound rooted in blues but with a contemporary appeal, and that served him well on his next two sessions, including “She’s Nineteen Years Old.” The rooming house St. Louis Jimmy lived in was at 3300 S. Calumet. Big Smokey Smothers also claimed authorship of “She’s Nineteen Years Old.”
145 “He was my favorite singer”: Berry, The Autobiography, p. 98.
145 “Yeah, see Leonard Chess”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
146 Sharecroppers, which had numbered: Daniel, Revolutions, p. 7, as per Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970.
146 “Fuck the hits”: Lasker interview with Malcolm Chisolm.
146 “It was a trend”: Guralnick, Home, p. 234; originally Lydon, Rock Folk.
146 number one on all three of their R&B charts: September 10, 1955. (Gart, First Pressings Vol. 5.)
147 he was not long from his first heart attack: Leonard had his first heart attack at the end of January 1957. By March of 1957, Billboard noted, “Len Chess, starting to show up at the Chess-Checker offices every day, says, ‘It sure is good to be back.’ ” (Gart, First Pressings Vol. 7, p. 39.)
147 “The stuff that really started him”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”
147 “Rock and roll kind of took over”: May 1956, in Billboard: “SIGN OF THE TIMES: Jukeboxes at the MOA Convention in Chi last week blasting forth with R&R all day, no matter what booth it was.” Same month:
R&B GOING STALE?: The past two years have seen the American disk-buying public — in reality, the entire disk-buying world — discovering what many in the business have always known: that the rhythm and blues field is one of the most fertile, honest, and dynamic sources of song material. It has explored the emotions frankly and directly, and it has voiced some penetrating views of society. And always, underneath it all, there has been “The Beat.” Today, it’s hardly a secret that R&B is the big thing in our popular music. But there are indications that the music that revitalized the business is now in danger of going stale. (Gart, First Pressings Vol. 6)
“I was playing in the clubs with Muddy in the late fifties,” said Billy Boy, “and Muddy didn’t do nothing but sing — he had Pat Hare playing guitar. Muddy would sit in the audience with his lady, and his bodyguards and valets and strong-arm men, and he would come up and sing three or four numbers. He had put his guitar down because things were changing and he felt nobody wanted to hear that dang stuff.”
148 “Forty Days and Forty Nights”: This is a big, bold record. Hare contributes a Chuck Berry–esque riff that may have inspired the Beatles’ “Revolution.” The song is similar to “Mystery Train,” which had been a hit for Junior Parker in 1954 (and to Arthur Crudup’s “Mean Old Frisco” from 1942). Cotton and Hare made “Mystery Train” part of the band’s pre-Muddy set, and when Muddy saw the audience’s reaction, he reworked the words and claimed the song.
148 the sound was quite different: “Don’t Go No Further” was the sound of the urban blues club, the very electric guitar propelling patrons up and over the South Side cinder-block top. The flip side, “Diamonds at Your Feet,” is a radical reinterpretation of “Take Sick and Die” from Muddy’s Library of Congress recordings. The dirge is here made jubilant; instead of mourning his baby’s passing, Muddy anticipates the occasion as a moment to celebrate her life. The session is rounded out by “Just to Be with You,” one of Muddy’s personal favorites.
149 “Got My Mojo Working”: Ann Cole recorded hers on January 27, 1957, for an April release. Muddy’s was recorded a month or so earlier. The week of April 27, 1957, Billboard made Muddy’s version a Buy o’ the Week: “This version of the tune is locked in competition with the Ann Cole disk. Most areas show it practically even with the latter.” (Gart, First Pressings Vol. 7.) “We played with her a couple times after that,” said Cotton, “once in Philadelphia at the Uptown Theater. We had a big hit on ‘Mojo,’ she asked Muddy not to sing it, so he didn’t. We let her do it because it was her song in the first place.”
Around the time of “Got My Mojo Working,” Muddy went on a tour that featured Sarah Vaughan. Researching the date of the tour only resulted in conflicting accounts. Cotton told me, “That was the big tour. Nappy Brown, Sarah Vaughan — it was her tour — the Moonglows, Ray Prysock, Arthur Prysock, Al Hibbler, Jimmy Witherspoon. We got booed the first day, in Washington, D.C., at the Howard Theater. They were there to see Sarah Vaughan.”
149 “So I told Muddy I couldn’t play out the night”: Trynka, “Howlin’ Wolf.”
150 “McCoys”: Trynka interview with Hubert Sumlin.
151 “We quit touring in January”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
155 “I only charge thirty-five cent”: For the musician, the money from a hit was in the gig pay. “A blues record,” said Marshall Chess, “if it sold seven or ten thousand in Chicago it was a hit. At eighty cents a record, that’s six or seven thousand dollars in a few weeks. The artist’s royalty I think was two or three percent, let’s say it was even five percent. It was complex ‘no rules’ time. There was
all this payola going on to get the record played and that wasn’t a recoupable investment, the label took care of all that. Songwriters’ royalties were two cents per cut. The writers’ portion was one cent. Let’s say the most you would do was forty thousand. Four hundred bucks worth? These guys liked it when Chess got the record on the radio in Chicago, all of a sudden you could get four or five hundred for a weekend at a club.”
Leonard Chess recalled for the Chicago Tribune how Chess responded to the payola charge. “We were the only company that refused to sign a cease and desist order. I was advised not to. Payola was standard practice in the industry and I told them I wouldn’t stop unless everyone else did. At least I was doing it honestly — make a deal and send ’em a check and at the end of the year report it on a 1099 form.” Leonard bought his first radio station in 1959. (Golkin, “Blacks, Whites, and Blues” part 2.)
155 he refused to let them feel the full impact: Chess’s Robin Hood accounting method was consistent with Guralnick’s interview with Marshall thirty years earlier: “Oh sure, we done a little padding. Sometimes when royalty time came around, let’s say that he had one group that was very big, my father might cut their royalty by five hundred bucks and add it to Wolf’s statement. But he didn’t ever put it in his own pocket.” (Guralnick, Home, p. 233.) Also, Nadine Cohodas recounts a story from the early 1960s: “[Producer Jack] Tracy was speechless during one meeting when Leonard was preparing the royalty checks. He looked at the statement with Jamal’s royalties, which were considerable, and at [Ramsey] Lewis’s, which were much smaller. He went over Jamal’s earnings again and then told the accountant, ‘That’s too much money for him — give some to Ramsey.” (Cohodas, Gold, p. 170.)
10: SCREAMING GUITAR AND HOWLING PIANO 1958–1959
Muddy, the English, and the Electric Guitar: “Lomax had lived over here for about six or seven years and he played a lot of the Library of Congress recordings on the BBC radio,” Paul Oliver said. “Anyone who had heard Muddy Waters would have heard him playing acoustic. When he played electric, it was a surprise. I felt rather thrilled by it, because he seemed right up to date. A lot of people still thought of blues as part of jazz, so it didn’t quite match their anticipations.”
“Muddy’s guitar wasn’t loud,” Chris Barber stated with affirmation. “No one complained to me, and if they had, I’d have told them to get out. We were paying Muddy and Otis ourselves. We’d got them there for our pleasure. We had toured with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and she played quite loud. We’d toured with Sonny and Brownie, and Brownie played amplified acoustic guitar. I didn’t think Muddy played very loud.” There’s a CD of one date, midtour in Manchester (Collaboration, Tomato Records); Muddy’s not shocking the ears.
He did, however, rock and roll at his unofficial gig at the Roundhouse, a small London pub with a blues night run by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis, two musicians who’d begun exploring blues before Muddy’s arrival. When Muddy and Otis strolled into the packed, smoky upstairs room around nine in the evening, they smelled spilled beer and felt the sting of thick cigarette smoke — aah, home. They were immediately offered the stage. Korner remained to accompany the two on his steel guitar. “At the concert [halls], [Spann] had suffered from poor amplification, but at the Roundhouse there was no trouble,” wrote Tony Standish. He continued:
The left hand rolled them, huge and blue, and the right hand hovered, making it sing, and then swooped and soared, showering us with piano blues such as we had never heard in the flesh. . . . Muddy mopped his perspiring brow and laid aside his guitar. And suddenly there was another Muddy, a Muddy who sang as he must for his own people, in another world than ours. . . . He sang with his whole body — gyrating, twisting, shouting — preaching the blues chorus upon hypnotic chorus, weaving a pattern of quivering tension around and over an enthralled audience. (Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 1)
“At the Roundhouse,” said Paul Oliver, “Muddy was closer to the audience and I think he was just rather more comfortable with it. He coped with the big concerts quite adequately, they were closer to the way he played on the first recordings he made for Aristocrat. It wasn’t tremendously heavy. But I think he liked the club atmosphere. That prepared me a little bit for my visit to Chicago the next year. But I couldn’t reckon with the kind of power and ferocity of his playing and performance on the South Side.”
Session Notes: “She’s into Something” is one of Muddy’s most uncharacteristic songs. In his basement, Muddy had mentioned that he was interested in trying something different. At the Broonzy session, the band played him “She’s into Something” with Spann singing, but Muddy cut them off before they could even get going, said, “Hold it, hold it, I don’t do no cha cha cha.”
“Clay could play a beat,” said James Cotton. “He said, ‘Let’s put a little cha cha on it.’ Pat Hare had his part. We picked it up like that.” Muddy was won over.
I was discussing Little Walter’s majestic harmonica sound from the January 1959 “Blues Before Sunrise” session with Chicago harmonica player and music interlocutor Dave Waldman, and he sent me this harmonica lesson, which he has allowed me to share:
The harp-player on the “Blues Before Sunrise” session was playing an octave harp. This would be a harp where, by blowing or drawing into one hole, you get a note and also the same note an octave higher. It’s not the same thing as a chromatic. As far as I can tell, the harp player on the session uses such an octave harp for the entirety of “Crawling Kingsnake,” except for the closing lick. This last lick is played on a normal ten-hole diatonic (probably a Marine Band) tuned in the key of A. (Note: the song is in the key of A, as are the other two songs from the session.) The octave harp also makes a brief appearance on “Mean Mistreater.” There, the harp-player plays the first two verses of the song using a Marine Band (or something like it) tuned in the key of D. (Playing a harp in this way — a fifth above the key that the harp is tuned in — is by far the most common approach to blues harp.) After the last line of the second verse (“because you got that on your mind”), the harp-player picks up a Marine Band in A and plays that for most of the next verse. (Playing a harp that is tuned in the same key as the key of the song is sometimes called “straight harp.”) However, in the middle of the last line of this verse (“Well you know you had the nerve to tell me”), the harp-player comes in with the octave harp. You’ll notice that when he first comes in, the harp-player does not seem to have completely found his bearings on the octave-harp and plays a few notes that don’t seem to fit with the key in which he’s playing. And indeed very soon afterward in the song, the harp-player abandons the octave-harp for something more conventional. In the middle of the second line of the next verse (between “ain’t it lonesome” and “sleeping by yourself”), the harp player comes back in with a D Marine Band and plays that for the remainder of the song. The octave harp on this session is the only use of such a harp that I’m familiar with in blues music.
157 without importing American artists: The British and the American musicians’ unions each forbade the other to play in their country for fear that local musicians would lose work. “There wasn’t a demand for British musicians in America,” Chris Barber told me, “but there was a big demand in Europe and Britain for American music. People leapt on boats to Dublin. My band chartered a plane to see Louis Armstrong in Paris in 1956. We tried to arrange a British Louis Armstrong tour backed by us. The British union was communist run and the union guy actually said to me, ‘Americans, bah! Why don’t you get a Russian trumpeter?’ ” The stonewalling broke when the British union wanted to import Paul Robeson.
157 two four-song EPs: The first English EP was on Vogue, entitled Muddy Waters with Little Walter, subtitled Mississippi Blues, and it contained “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” “Feel Like Going Home,” “Evans Shuffle,” and “Louisiana Blues.” The other was on the London label, named Mississippi Blues: Muddy Waters and His Guitar, and it featured “Young-Fashioned Ways,” “Mannish Boy,” “All
Aboard,” and “Forty Days and Forty Nights.”
158 “I was going overseas”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
158 “They thought I was a Big Bill Broonzy”: Rooney, Bossmen.
159 “They began slowly, feeling their way”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 1.
161 “I fled from the hall”: Fancourt, Liner notes to The Complete Muddy Waters.
161 “I drove ’em crazy”: Bill Dahl, “Muddy Waters Reigns As King.” Illinois Entertainer, May 1981.
161 “When I wormed my way backstage”: Wilmer, “First Time,” p. 87.
161 “There weren’t many black people in this country”: Author interview with Val Wilmer.
In England, through great difficulty, Paul Oliver had acquired a photograph of Muddy, which he presented for an autograph. Muddy whipped out his rubber stamp and inkpad to hammer his signature. The ink was dry so he stamped it again, and several times more, until he’d covered the photograph in stamped signatures.
162 “I didn’t play my guitar”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
163 red Telecaster: “A guy in Chicago made me a neck for it,” Muddy told Tom Wheeler, “a big stout neck with the high nut to raise up the strings for slide. I needed to strengthen it up because of the big strings.” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)
“We went through a chain of amps,” Jimmy Rogers told me. “Gibson was first and then we went from that to Fender and went from that to Standells. I like a Fender better than any amp that I’ve played. The sound of the Twin is clean and it’s slick. I can dirty it up as much as I want, but I like for it to be clean.”
163 “Now I know that the people in England”: Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 258.
163 “I realized I could play guitar”: Trynka, Mojo (April 1998).
Muddy left England on Monday, November 3, an eleven o’clock flight. He and Otis changed planes in New York, then on to Chicago. They arrived in time to make their regular Wednesday-night gig at the F&J Lounge in Gary. According to a note in Billboard, they made recordings during their New York layover: “Muddy, recently returned from Europe, will dish out some of the tunes he recorded on his return stay in NY.” (Gart, First Pressings.)
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