week of 1/15/03
 
 
 

Tracing Muddy’s legacy
By Karl Rohr

I never met Muddy Waters, but on one frigid night in 1991 I drank whiskey with one of his former bandmates.

Jimmy Rogers, Waters’ guitarist and right-hand man on many of his classic recordings, blew into Butte, Mont., for a show, and I was a young newspaper reporter who wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to talk to a man I had been listening to since I was 14. I don’t know how Rogers found his way to Butte, but there we were at a bar talking about Muddy Waters.

Actually, I did most of the talking. He had evidently been at the bar for some time. After politely listening to a barrage of questions, he looked me over from head to toe and interrupted me with a firm “How old are you, man?”

I told him I was 29. He let out a snickering, drawn-out expletive that started with “s” and looked me in the eye. “Look man, you ain’t gonna know nothin’ until you’re fifty years old,” he said. “A man can’t be called smart until he’s fifty. When you’re fifty, you’ve learned something.”

I never forgot that incident. I especially remembered it six years later when I was living in Mississippi, the home state of Waters, Rogers and countless other blues musicians. Driving through the sweltering Mississippi Delta in an old car with no air conditioning, with blues tapes blasting, I was always struck by the same feeling: Intoxicated by this beautiful and brutal music, and mad as hell that any American should be born into the circumstances that produced it.

Rogers was right. The bluesman’s art had been shaped by his environment and life experiences, not a classroom. These guys measured intelligence by how much you could successfully escape your origins, how much you could outfox those constantly trying to cheat you and how long you could physically survive. A select few of these musicians, through toughness of character and depth of artistic vision, rose above the rest and not only endured, they changed the American musical landscape.

But one of them, Muddy Waters, still stands alone in his impact. His life story, epic in its historical sweep and unfortunately true to the lyrics he sang, has finally been adequately told. Robert Gordon’s Can’t be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters is a thrilling, amusing, and often terrifying tour through the world of some of the most famous blues musicians who ever lived. It’s a trip not for the timid, but it gives us our most intimate look at a giant in African-American music.

As the author explains, “... Muddy’s achievement is the triumph of the dirt farmer. His music brought respect to a culture dismissed as offal. His music spawned the triumphant voice of angry people demanding change. This dirt has meaning.”

Gordon, a Memphis native and the author of It Came from Memphis and The King of the Road, meticulously describes Waters’ life from his birth in 1915 to his death in 1983. For too long, the story of Waters’ transformation of country blues into the loud, mean, erotic electrified blues of urban Chicago and eventually rock-and-roll has been told too simplistically, as if Waters reached Chicago fully formed. All he needed was an amplifier.

But Gordon shows us how Waters developed himself in Chicago, a process more difficult than has previously been described. He had to learn standard guitar tuning for the first time and work hard at playing with a group other than his country string bands in Mississippi. Moreover, he came into Chicago while swing and more sophisticated blues reigned supreme, and it took time to find an audience among the transplanted southern blacks.

The book is primarily about music, but since that music is the blues, it means that music and life are the same. Many incidents are harrowing, the characters colorful, the violence real and the temptations ever present. Those songs didn’t spring from thin air.

This is also a book about the music business, which Waters negotiated fairly well. Gordon credits the brothers Leonard and Phil Chess for fueling Waters’ drive and success, and argues that because Waters was a yes man who wouldn’t rock the boat of those who paid him, he stayed on top of his game. As Waters said at Leonard’s funeral, “I made him and he made me.”

Although Gordon is sometimes critical of Waters’ concession to his white bosses, he describes their relationship as mutually beneficial. The author is less kind to Alan Lomax, the groundbreaking folklorist who recorded Waters on Stovall’s Plantation in Mississippi in 1941 and 1942. After the recording project, which showcased Waters’ slide guitar and rural themes he would never again explore, Lomax ignored letters that Waters wrote with the help of a friend asking for promised payment and further contact. The letters, heartwrenching in their honesty and desperation, are included in the book.

Lomax recorded Waters with the help of Fisk University musicologist John Work III, a black man. Gordon argues that Lomax’s paternalistic vein ignored the contributions of Work, who receives only brief mention in Lomax’s autobiography, Land Where the Blues Began, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Written 50 years after many of the events described, Lomax’s book is notoriously fuzzy on dates and details, including the Waters sessions. Moreover, Gordon points to a passage written by Lomax that is very similar to words written by Work 50 years earlier.

“Lomax recorded the blues culture, but did not absorb the spirit of cooperation that made the blues thrive,” Gordon writes.

Gordon wisely includes the lives and crucial roles of Waters’ stellar sidemen. The steady, disciplined Jimmy Rogers provided counterpoint to the wildness of other musicians whose lives were torn straight from the lyrics of the songs they played. Otis Spann, to whom Waters swore absolute allegiance, dazzled fellow musicians with his piano work while he steadily drank himself to death. The irrepressible and volatile Little Walter, who revolutionized the harmonic and tonal possibilities of the harmonica, amazed and terrified friends, audiences and fellow musicians with his talent, hustle, energy, resourcefulness and lifestyle destined to crash and burn early.

He was not alone in this respect. Sonny Boy Williamson, a blues harmonica pioneer who gave Waters some of his first Chicago gigs, was stabbed and died in the street after a show. The jealous wife of another harmonica player, Henry Strong, stabbed her husband in the chest after she caught him talking to his girlfriend; he died before Waters could get him to the hospital. Little Walter, already a walking skeleton by 1968, died from a hammer blow to the head sustained during a gambling argument. Guitarist Pat Hare, who recorded a song in 1954 called “I’m Going to Murder My Baby,” shot and killed his girlfriend and then died in prison.

A more familiar name emerges in a new light. Blues myth has portrayed Waters’ West Side rival Howling Wolf as a hulking force of nature, illiterate and ill-tempered, as wild and untamed offstage as he was during his scorching live shows. But Gordon shows us a gentle giant who chose to live as independently as possible rather than submit to the will of others. As one musician put it, “The difference was if you played in Wolf’s band and got fired or quit, you could draw unemployment compensation. If you walked up to Muddy and said something like unemployment compensation they’d think you were crazy – ‘What the hell’s that?’”

One of the most memorable images in the book is that of the Wolf wearing spectacles and sitting backstage reading a book for his night school class. A musician explained that “Muddy didn’t have the drive, the initiative that Wolf had. Muddy let (James) Cotton run his show. Wolf wouldn’t be sitting at no table with no woman. Wolf would be on that stage kicking ass all night long. Muddy was a great artist, but he became less of a draw in the Chicago clubs than Wolf, until the white audiences came along and rescued him.”

Waters embraced white audiences through the help of British rockers and American folkies, and he seemed genuinely humbled by the attention. His gigs for white audiences would progress far beyond those he played at the all-white southern universities, where the lights had to be turned off so that black musicians could not see white girls dancing.

He truly respected only a handful of white blues musicians. The problem, according to the distinctly unsaved Waters, was that they had not spent enough time in the Baptist church. “They didn’t get that soul down deep in the heart like I have,” Waters said. “And they can’t deliver the message.”

Gordon relies heavily on scores of interviews conducted personally and compiled from archival sources. His research includes 73 pages of endnotes that shouldn’t be missed, for they feature many of the book’s most dramatic highlights, including an unforgettable account of Waters’ appearance in the film, “The Last Waltz” (he tried to pick up Joni Mitchell without knowing who she was), which after a lifetime in the business, gave Waters his first royalty check. Other notes of interest include his thoughts on guitars and the technical aspects of performing live.

Gordon begins and ends his book with recent visits to old haunts of Waters. He points out in chilling detail the persistence of the blues in a dilapidated ruin of one of Waters’ homes, sometimes inhabited by a homeless stepson of Waters. The conclusion takes the reader to a run-down fix-it shop next door to what was formerly the 708 Club, a famous site for live blues from the masters. Two elderly men sit inside, one trying to play blues guitar with palsied fingers. A woman stands outside trying to bum money for drugs.

The author’s sense of historical perspective, his deep understanding of the blues world and especially his knowledge of music make this book essential reading for any blues fan or anyone interested in twentieth century African-American culture. Gordon reminds us that the blues hang in the air of certain regions of America, omnipotent and ever evolving, ready to seep into creative minds and souls. The blues found a permanent address in the soul of Muddy Waters, who helped change American life and culture.

(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu.)