Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Bill had a lot of wisdom. One night we were playing a club back in the early fifties. I was the MC, and Bill was singing “Plough Hand Blues”—I’ll never forget that—and when he sang that and you heard him play the guitar, you could just feel the fields and you could just feel the sharecroppers. It’s about the mule dying on him.

  In the middle of the song, a couple of hipsters rudely walked out. One was a white kid, one was a black kid, and I was furious because I was caught unaware, otherwise I’d have chopped them up as you have to do as an MC. I’d have done a job on them, but they walked out. As we’re sitting at the bar during intermission, I was furious. Bill says, “Why you sore?” and I says, “Those kids walking out on that song.” And Bill says, “Why, it’s not their fault. Don’t blame them—it’s about a mule, what do they know about a mule?” That’s the Big Bill Broonzy I knew and loved.

  CHICAGO BLUES, SIXTIES STYLE

  By Samuel Charters

  [From the liner notes to Chicago/The Blues/Today!, Vol. 1, 1966]

  To get down to the South Side, you get the Elevated somewhere in the Loop, or walk down one of the entrances on State Street where it’s still a subway. The lines fan out across the flattened hand that’s Chicagolike the veins close to the skin. Over the rooftops, you can see the trains, on their rusted metal trestles, moving above the streets. The buildings have been dredged out of the ground for twenty blocks below the business district for an urban renewal project, but after the Elevated gets south of this you begin to see the slums, Chicago’s sprawling Negro ghetto. The backs of the buildings line the tracks, rows of wooden porches, spindly and weathered, painted a dull gray-blue. The patches of yard between the porches and the tracks are black with coal dust and littered with loose trash and garbage. Toward the lake you can see the stone apartment buildings along South Parkway and Prairie Avenue. After a spring rain, or on a slow, fading sunset afternoon, there is a dim elegance to the South Side. The bricks and stones have a soft warmth, and since the buildings are low you can see the sky hanging over your head. But when you get off the train and walk down the painted iron stairway to the street you can see the worn paint on the windowsills and doorways, the cracking pavement of the sidewalks, the worn ground in front of the buildings, which always means too many children and no place for them to play.

  But you go down to the South Side for the blues, not for its dirty streets or shabby apartment buildings. The South Side is the last place left in the country where a living music is still played in local bars and neighborhood clubs. It’s what New Orleans used to be like in the thirties, what Memphis was like in the twenties. In Chicago, on the South Side, it’s still today for the blues.

  You can get off the train at two or three stops if you want to find the music. Turner’s Blue Lounge is just below the tracks at Fortieth and South Indiana, a one-story building with a few tables inside, a bar along one wall, a jukebox, and a small bandstand. The music at Turner’s is like the place, rough and direct, and everybody’s played there at one time or another. One night there was a noise around the neighborhood because there was a new musician just up from Mississippi, a young intent singer who was playing an electrified slide guitar. He had to tune it two or three times for the crowd, and then they watched his fingers while he played: “When I get to Chicago nowhere for me to go/When I get to Chicago nowhere for me to go/Left my hometown, everyone I know.”

  If you get off at Forty-third Street it’s only a few blocks down the street to Pepper’s Lounge. There’s still a window mural painted on the outside of the club, a large drawing of one of the bluesmen, “The Boss, Pepper’s,” “Otis Rush … The Great Muddy Waters …” usually a sign over the door listing who’s going to be playing for the week. Beer’s 35 cents a bottle, and there’s usually a chair empty at a table near the bandstand; so you sit until the night’s half over listening to the blues.

  It’s only a block to Theresa’s from the El stop at Forty-seventh Street—an old basement apartment in a brick building at the corner of Forty-eighth and Indiana. You go down a short flight of steps to get to the door, past a signboard fastened to a wire fence beside the steps. “Beer to go at popular prices … featuring live music … free gifts to the ladies.” A tattered notice, “Every Fri. Sat. & Sun. Jr. Wells.” A narrow, dark room, the bandstand at the far end with a little space left cleared between the tables for anybody who wants to use the concrete floor for dancing. And from Theresa’s, it isn’t too far down Forty-seventh Street to the J and C Lounge, with its painted strip of cartoons that slowly revolves above the bar and its suspicious doorman who holds the door shut with a length of chain until you can prove that you’re old enough to drink. Inside it’s crowded and the music clamors against the narrow walls over the heads of the dancers milling in front of the bandstand. The guitar player and the drummer stay on the stand, but a harp player from the neighborhood pulls the microphone cord as far as it will go and sits at a table beside his girl, blowing the blues for her over the din. You keep your coat on for a set or two; then you finish the bottle of beer and get back out to the street. The blues is still the South Side’s music, and the stares get hostile if you stay too long. But the music stays with you as you ride the El back to the Loop, rubbing against your skin with its hard strength.

  Junior Wells (right) in a late-night harmonica duet—or duel—with James Cotton at Theresa’s, 1976, ten years after Sam Charters first visited the Chicago club.

  GETTING A HIT BLUES RECORD

  By Willie Dixon

  [with Don Snowdon] [From I Am the Blues, 1989]

  Chess gave me a contract and this contract didn’t have too much of a stipulation on it. They insisted that I assist them in everything they’d do. At that time, the Chess company was on the northwest corner at Forty-ninth and Cottage Grove. Then they moved down to a bigger place at Forty-eighth and Cottage Grove.

  When I first met the Chess brothers, I thought this was going to be a beautiful thing for me to execute some of what I thought I knew. They let me have a free run with just about everything because Leonard used to admit that he didn’t know as much about it as he thought I did. He treated me with respect, about as much as the average black folks was getting, and that wasn’t too much anywhere.

  My job was to assist. I did everything from packing records to sweeping the floor to answering the telephone to making out orders, but they weren’t giving me much of a pay thing. They promised to give me so much a week against my royalties, and then every week, I’d have to damn near fight or beg for the money…

  I had told Leonard Chess I had quite a few songs, but he never wanted too many of them at first. A couple of years after I started working there, I told him about this particular song, “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

  “Man, Muddy can do this number,” I said.

  “Well, if Muddy likes it, give it to him,” he said, and told me where Muddy was working. Muddy and I had talked about the song on a couple of occasions. I had sung “Hoochie Coochie Man” out there where we used to go out and meet him and play on the South Side when I had the Big Three Trio.

  I went over there to the Club Zanzibar at Fourteenth Street and Ashland. At intermission, I had Muddy come off the stage and I was telling him, “Man, this song is a natural for you.”

  “Well, it’ll take me a little while to learn it,” Muddy said.

  “No, this is right down your alley. I got an idea for a little riff that anybody can play.”

  You know how it is, a lot of guys feel like if you made a song complicated, it would do more. I always tried to explain that the simpler a thing is, the easier it can get across with the public.

  He and I talked about it and I said, “Get your guitar.” We went and stood right in the front of the bathroom by the door. People were walking by us all the time and I said, “Now, here’s your riff: ‘Da-da-da-da-Da.’“

  “Oh, Dixon, ain’t nothing to that.”

  “Now remember this: The gypsy woman told my mother/Da-da-da-da-Da/Before I was
born/Da-da-da-da-Da/You got a boy child coming/Da-da-da-da-Da/He’s gonna be a sonuvagun.”

  He could remember those words because they were the type of words anybody can remember easily. All through the history of mankind, there have been people who were supposed to be able to tell the future before it came to pass. People always felt it would be great to be one of these people: “This guy is a hoodoo man, this lady is a witch, this other guy’s a hoochie coochie man, she’s some kind of voodoo person.”

  In the South, the gypsies would come around and tell fortunes. When I was a little boy, you’d see a covered wagon coming along and these women with their great big dresses—doggone knows how many dresses they’d have on—and all of them would have pockets up under them. I didn’t know some of them would steal, you know. Nobody’s paying attention to a little kid like me walking around there, and these gypsies would take little gadgets from rooms.

  Naturally, if somebody who wants your money and wants to use you is going to tell you a story, they have to tell you something you want to hear. If the gypsies come up to some lady’s house and she’s pregnant, the first thing they’d say is, “Ooh, you’re going to have a fine fat boy. He’s gonna be able to tell the future before it comes to pass.”

  The average person wants to brag about themselves because it makes that individual feel big. “The gypsy woman told my mother/Before I was born”—that shows I was smart from the beginning. “Got a boy child coming/Gonna be a sonuvagun”—now I’m here. These songs make people want to feel like that because they feel like that at heart, anyway. They just haven’t said it, so you say it for them.

  Like the song “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” a lot of times people say this in their minds or think it. You don’t have to say it but everybody knows that’s the way you feel anyway because that’s how the other fella feels. You know how you feel so you figure the other fella feels the same way because his life is just like yours.

  To know the blues is to know a feeling and understanding within people that puts you in the position of other people by feeling and understanding the plight that they’re involved in. You don’t always get the experience in the blues from the life you live because sometimes these things are built into a certain individual.

  A man don’t have to be starving to know how it feels to starve. All he’s got to do is know how it feels to miss one or two meals and he knows that other fella is in much worse shape. But if a person don’t have no feeling, no imagination or understanding, you can’t create a feeling with him because he doesn’t hear what you say.

  Willie Dixon in Chicago, 1989

  We fooled around with “Hoochie Coochie Man” there in the washroom for fifteen or twenty minutes. Muddy said, “I’m going to do this song first so I don’t forget it.” He went right up onstage that first night and taught the band the little riff I showed him. He did it first shot and, sure enough, the people went wild over it. He was doing that song until the day he died…

  I really wasn’t well known as a songwriter until “Hoochie Coochie Man.” I must have had 150 songs, a whole bagful, when I went there but I couldn’t get ‘em out…

  [Then] “Hoochie Coochie Man” was selling so good Leonard wanted me to come up with another one right away. We did this “Make Love to Me” (“I Just Want to Make Love to You”) and then I told him about “I’m Ready” so we went with that and it got to going pretty good…

  I’ve been real lucky about writing people songs but a lot of times, if I picked the song, the guy didn’t want the song for himself. Muddy didn’t want the ones I was giving him and Howlin’ Wolf didn’t want the ones I was givin’ him. The one Wolf hated most of all was “Wang Dang Doodle.” He hated that “Tell Automatic Slim and Razor-Toting Jim.” He’d say, “Man, that’s too old-timey, sound like some old levee camp number.”

  I wrote several songs for Muddy but after that first one, I didn’t have to convince him very much about a song. I had been trying to give Little Walter “My Babe” because of his style of doing things, but it took damn near two years for him to record it.

  “I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present—and something to give people inspiration for the future.”—Willie Dixon

  Whenever I work with an artist or group, I like to hear them and get a feeling about the style that people like to hear them sing. I could make a song on the spot sometimes that would fit the individual just by watching his action. There are certain ways people act and music just fits what they’re doing.

  The average blues song must have a feeling or the world won’t accept it. You have to have a lot of inspiration and you have to be able to sell that inspiration to the other fellow. If the artist can express the song with inspiration, it inspires the public because music has that generating thing. If it touches you and you can feel it, you can inspire someone else. It’s just like electricity going from one to the other.

  Feeling has a lot to do with it all the time. If some guy calls you a dirty name, you know when the guy means it and when he’s just kidding. Dusty Fletcher was a comedian who used to do the “Open the door, Richard” routine onstage everywhere. He would come on at the Regal Theater in Chicago and cuss and raise hell and talk more bad talk onstage and everybody would be crying they laughed so much. Somebody else says “damn” onstage and everybody’s insulted.

  I felt Little Walter had the feeling for this “My Babe” song. He was the type of fellow who wanted to brag about some chick, somebody he loved, something he was doing or getting away with. He fought it for two long years and I wasn’t going to give the song to nobody but him.

  He said many times he just didn’t like it but, by 1955, the Chess people had gained confidence enough in me that they felt if I wanted him to do it, it must be his type of thing. The minute he did it, BOOM! she went right to the top of the charts.

  AND IT’S DEEP, TOO BY TOURE

  There is no collective organ south of the brain that can claim a greater impact on American history than the black penis. Only a foot fetishist would argue otherwise. The black penis, with its perpetual promise of gargantuan size and guaranteed satisfaction, is an icon as integral to this country’s fabric as baseball and apple pie.

  In the Old South during slavery, as another way of dehumanizing them, black men—and women too—were portrayed as animalistic and in touch with raw, wild sexuality. But the implicit sexual power of the black man was a challenge to the paternalism of the day. Many lynchings, sparked by a black man’s actual or fictional approach to a white woman, concluded with the lynched maris organ in his mouth. During the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Chicago boy Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman. The fear of black male sexuality had led to de facto laws separating black men from white women, which were enforced no matter how puny the transgressor.

  One might think an iconography so littered with blood and death would die away by itself, but in the years since slavery the myth of the Big Black Dick has been embraced by black men, remaining central to how we relate to America. The oversexed, ultracool, impossibly cocksure black superstud who walks like there’s a loaded weapon in his pocket and is self-reported to be fabulously endowed is alive on our streets and in our cultural self-expression—from the original Shaft, to the career personas of Prince, Barry White, Samuel L. Jackson, and 2Pac, to the phallocentric swagger that pervades hip-hop. Richard Pryor loved to tell a joke that was quite obviously older than him, in which two black men stop by the side of the river to take a piss. One says to the other, “Water sure is cold.” The other says, “Yeah. And it’s deep, too.” The joke was so seminal to Pryor’s oeuvre that his nine-disc retrospective was named And It’s Deep, Too!

  One of the greatest characters in the long line of legendary black cocksmen is the Hoochie Coochie Man as painted by Muddy Waters in his epic pair of songs “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy.”

  In 1954, when Emmett Till was thirteen and still livin
g with his mother in Chicago, McKinley Morganfield, known to all as Muddy Waters, also resided in Chicago and was about to record the biggest hit of his career. Willie Dixon wrote “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and in January of 1954 Muddy recorded it with Dixon on bass. The song was an immediate success. Muddy’s record sold four thousand copies in a week, reaching Number Eight on the Billboard R&B chart, and enabling him to buy a house on Chicago’s South Side. A year later, just months before the Till murder rocked the nation, Muddy wrote “Mannish Boy,” which is basically a second draft of “Hoochie Coochie,” using the same rhythm and, more, telling the same story. Both songs are constructed like short stories, and when the stories are laid together they tell the tale of one of the greatest cocksmen who ever lived.

  The story of the Hoochie Coochie Man, as told by Muddy Waters, begins before he’s born when a gypsy woman tells his mother she’s going to have a boy child and he’s going to be something else. “He’s gonna make pretty womens jump and shout,” Muddy tells us of the unborn child. When the Hoochie Coochie Man gets to age five (in “Mannish Boy”), his mother tells him he’s going to grow up to be the greatest man alive. In both songs, Muddy’s vocal attack is so aggressive that he’s growling almost as if to suggest a sexual monster, thus he needs to give no proof that these epic prophecies will come true.

  In “Mannish Boy,” a harem-chorus screams with just-ravished delight behind Muddy’s swaggering boasts in a wonderful bit of music theater.

  In both songs, most of the verses are not about sex but about fixing the Hoochie Coochie Man’s voodoo credentials, because now the lyrics are racing to catch up with the promises inherent in Muddy’s growling bluesy voice. We learn that he was born on the seventh hour of the seventh day in the seventh month with seven doctors, and that he’s got a black cat bone and a John the Conqueror root. We get voodoo credentials (instead of, say, the description of his technique) because this enhances his sexual mystique and highlights the magic realism and gross exaggeration that a storyteller relies on to tell this sort of a tale accurately.