Can't Be Satisfied (17 page)

Muddy was not home the autumn day of 1947 to receive the call that changed his career. He was at his day job, in his delivery truck, as unaware
of the
encounter ahead as he had been of Alan Lomax’s arrival. Muddy was driving for the Westerngrade Venetian Blinds Company. “He’d deliver them, then he’d go home, play around,
then go back to the factory,” said Jimmy Rogers. “You’d see that doggone truck sitting in front of Muddy’s place a lot of the time. He’d be in there eating or
something. He had a good gig like that.” Annie Mae had by then found her own place, and Muddy’s childhood friend Bo, back from serving Uncle Sam, moved into the second bedroom, helping
Muddy with the rent.

The invitation to record for Leonard Chess came from piano player Sunnyland Slim, who had talked himself onto an Aristocrat session in the last quarter of 1947. Sunnyland, never one to miss a
gig and a catalyst for many artists of Muddy’s generation, knew that Leonard was trying to get the label going, and rumors of another musician’s union ban on recording were forcing
label owners to stockpile material. Leonard, having cut a full band, was interested in trying a smaller group, where the complications were fewer, the studio time more cost-efficient, and the
results — two songs on a ten-inch 78 RPM record — about the same. Lightnin’ Hopkins was hot at the time, John Lee Hooker. Sunnyland, who’d been gigging with Muddy, told
Leonard he had just the man for this new sound. Goldberg, Leonard’s scout, was at the studio and verified this new artist’s talent. Sunny phoned Muddy, who was out on the truck. Leonard
told Sunny, “Hell man, go get him,” and Goldberg told Sunny, “Find him today, find him today.”

Sunny again called Muddy’s house and, with Muddy’s roommate Bo, devised a scheme. Bo phoned the Westerngrade office and left a message for McKinley Morganfield —
“Mac” to his coworkers — that his mother was sick, please come home. His mother being long dead, Muddy knew something was up. Sunnyland, in the meantime, hopped a bus over to the
West Side. When Muddy got home, Sunny was there, jumpy most likely, as valuable session time was ticking by, which is what he explained to Muddy. “Bang!” said Jimmy Rogers. “That
was right up Muddy’s alley.” They drove Muddy’s car back to the session.

As for money, the job at Westerngrade Venetian Blinds would have paid better. As for records, Muddy would soon make better. But for historic moments, this session was
mighty, inaugurating a twenty-eight-year relationship between Muddy Waters and the Chess brothers.

“Two or three days after the session, Muddy told me he done made a tape for Chess,” said Jimmy Rogers. “Muddy said, ‘Man, I don’t know how it’s gonna sound
but I got my foot in the door, I think.’ Finally we got a hold of a disc of it, and we played it.” Rogers was surprised by the emptiness of what he heard. All their work at building a
band sound had been dismissed in favor of Leonard’s misguided attempt to recreate country blues. The session had not involved Muddy’s regular band; Ernest “Big” Crawford, a
bassist, was there to record with Andrew Tibbs, and Sunnyland had grabbed him and a drummer to back up Muddy. But it was more than that. Leonard wanted a country blues hit, but he didn’t
understand country blues. Piano players were what taverns hired; Leonard simply couldn’t grasp the guitar as a lead instrument. So when Muddy’s “Little Anna Mae” should rip
into a guitar solo, the piano takes the lead. Muddy’s talents were again thwarted.

Sunnyland’s sides were released (“Sunny Land Slim with Muddy Water”), but Leonard shelved Muddy’s for several agonizing months. When “Gypsy Woman” and
“Little Anna Mae” were finally released in February of 1948, they didn’t set Chicago afire, but there was interest.

Muddy had to wait until April of 1948 for his next invitation to the studio. Despite yet another ban called by James Petrillo, the independent labels continued to work, staking a claim to the
blues market. Still Leonard continued moving in the wrong direction, resisting Muddy’s efforts to bring in his band. Clinging to his own partialities, Leonard introduced a saxophone to the
lineup. As a result, “Good Lookin’ Woman” and “Mean Disposition” also ended up on a shelf, unreleased during Muddy’s lifetime.

After Muddy, Sunnyland cut two with the same combo. When the session was finished — Leonard’s way — Muddy could contain himself no longer. “I said, let me do one,”
recounted Muddy, “by myself.”
And Muddy started in on his material, playing his Delta blues on an electric guitar. His choice was a sure thing, a song with an
undeniable bounce that had worked on Alan Lomax, was working in the Chicago clubs, and like eyesight to the blind, should have worked on Leonard Chess: “I Can’t Be Satisfied.”

The sound was not the full urban blues of Muddy’s band, but the amplifier did sustain longer than an acoustic guitar — the notes hung in the air like Delta humidity, and there was a
ferociousness to the full chord. Big Crawford thumped out a doghouse sound on his upright bass, bolstering the rhythm. “He was laughing at me,” remembered Muddy. “Said,
‘This is my type of stuff.’ ” The bottleneck slide sang of the South, the electric instrument rang of the North. Leonard asked aloud, “What the hell is he
singing?”

He still couldn’t hear it.

“Leonard Chess, he didn’t know what it was,” said Muddy of his boldly amplified country blues. “He didn’t like my style of singing. The woman that was his partner,
Evelyn Aron, she dug me.” Muddy, ever the ladies’ man.

Aristocrat 1305 — Muddy Waters with Rythm (
sic
) Accompaniment, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” / “I Feel Like Going Home” — was released early on an
April weekend in 1948. These are the same two songs he recorded for the 1941 Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study. Perhaps not surprisingly, though the notes are nearly the same (yet
so much richer), the feel — and the lyrics — are different. He’s no longer singing behind a mule or beneath an open sky; he’s a factory worker whose vision of God behind the
stars is narrowed by a maze of buildings. He picks notes, but with the strength of one fighting an unyielding metal machine, and when he strikes chords, it’s with force enough to fell a
streetcar. “Country Blues” has become “I Feel Like Going Home,” a mishearing of the double entendre “feel like blowing my horn,” though similar in its yearning
for comfort and companionship. The verse about “leaving this morning if I have to ride the blinds” has been dropped; Muddy and his audience have ridden those blinds.

Released on a Friday, the first pressing was nearly gone by Saturday night. The first Petrillo ban was like a flood that swept that insincere
chiffon world clean, and
Muddy, a blues Noah, cultivated a music devoted to emotion, feeling, truth. “You couldn’t get one in Chicago nowhere,” said Muddy. “The people were buyin’ two or three
at a time. They started a limit, one to a customer.” Stores jacked up the prices, the seventy-nine-cent record soon selling for more than a dollar. At the Maxwell Street Radio Company, Muddy
exclaimed, “But I’m the man who made it.” He left with a single copy.

The record caught the ear of
Billboard,
the music industry’s leading trade paper. Though their reviewer didn’t care for it (“Poor recording distorts vocal and steel
guitar backing”), it rose to number eleven on their Most-Played Jukebox Race Records chart. And though Muddy found the music “empty” without his band, the popularity of the record
made it easy to like. “Muddy was playing when I was plowing,” B. B. King remembered, “mules that is. When I first heard of Muddy Waters, I had never left Mississippi. Then finally
we started to get records on him — ‘I Feel Like Going Home.’ He had something that no one else had, and I loved to hear him play.”

Others loved to hear Muddy too. “Then Chess began to come close to me, because Andrew Tibbs [Chess’s bet] had done failed,” said Muddy. “ ‘Come down and let’s
have coffee together.’ ‘I don’t drink coffee.’ ‘We’ll get a sandwich. Come on down to the office.’ Yeah, he was my buddy, but I was glad, man. Hey, I had
worked all my life to get my name up there. He did a lot for me, putting out the first record and everything. I didn’t even sign no contract with him, no nothing. It was just ‘I belongs
to the Chess family.’ ”

Belonging to a family was an arrangement comfortable for Muddy in its familiarity. In Mississippi, Muddy had “belonged” to a family, knew how to get by — and get ahead —
through a personal relationship with a boss man. The Chicago factories, on the other hand, were huge impersonal places. And through their work together, Leonard and Muddy developed a real
friendship, a lasting friendship, two outsiders who captured the zeitgeist of not just an era but also a people and a place. When Muddy had his first promotional photo made, he was beaming.

The record’s success paid in bigger crowds and better gigs — the Zanzibar and the nearby Boogie Woogie Inn on Roosevelt. Then it
was the Chicken Shack, the
Purple Cat, Lowell King’s club down from the White Sox ballpark. On Sundays, they played afternoon gigs at Silvio’s, breaking down around eight to set up elsewhere for a night gig, nine
till two. Docie’s Lounge on the South Side, Romeo’s Place, the Squeeze Club, Brown’s Village, the 708 Club (a fancier place despite the exposed plumbing pipes that ran
throughout), the Ebony Lounge. At the Du Drop Lounge, 3609 Wentworth, they shared the bill with Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie, a capsule history of recent musical changes presented in one
evening.

Prophetically, the printed label of this record put an “s” on Muddy’s last name. The transformation of backwater McKinley Morganfield was complete. About a month after his hit
record’s release, Muddy rode home from a gig. “I could hear that record all up in people’s houses. I’d stop my car and look up and listen a little while. Ooooh, once I got a
little scared. I used to wonder if I had died! All of a sudden I became Muddy Waters. Just overnight.” He’d become a blues star.

In the two and a half years he was with Aristocrat, Muddy recorded thirty-five sides, twenty-five of them as bandleader. If Evelyn Aron, Leonard’s partner, dug
Muddy’s music, Leonard quickly dug the way he sold.

Muddy knew that his band was forging an exciting sound and he never stopped pressing Leonard to record them together. Leonard finally paid a visit to the Zanzibar. White faces there were
uncommon, but Leonard was accustomed to that. “Muddy said, ‘Leonard’s here,’ ” Rogers remembered. “ ‘He wants to hear us play some of the stuff that we
do.’ Leonard sat there and listened, looked around to see what the people thought about it. It was moving them. Leonard’s saying, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’ ” Sounds
good then, sounds good now. Sounds eternally good. But the idea of wrangling that sound in the studio was beyond Leonard’s accomplishments. He’d recorded combos, but no groups as
aggressive as this, and based on Muddy’s sales, he didn’t need to learn.

While sales were good, royalties were not forthcoming. “Muddy
couldn’t pay his car note,” said Jimmy Rogers. “We used to hide his old car to keep
the finance company from takin’ it. He’d stay in it, send somebody in the store to get what he wanted. Then he’d come back over to my house and hide it in my garage. Chess would
dodge him, say he’s not in or something, ’cause Chess was scufflin’ himself. But Muddy had to pay rent. He’d say, ‘Damn! It’s a wild-goose chase there with
Chess.’ ”

To keep a roof over their heads, they began picking up outside sessions. Sunnyland Slim gathered Muddy, Little Walter, Baby Face Leroy Foster, and a few others on a session for the small label
Tempo Tone. Poorly recorded, it’s mostly piano with Walter singing. Jimmy Rogers, through backing Memphis Minnie in clubs, landed a session in 1949 for Regal Records. Everyone — Muddy,
Walter, Big Crawford, the omnipresent Sunnyland Slim, and a drummer — pushed through the door with him. Walter grabbed the piano’s mike, relegating Sunnyland to the background and
letting his harp assume a lead sound, diving like a duck between the guitars. The whole band cut just one song, “Ludella,” and the audio was again impaired by equipment limitations; it
doesn’t capture the band’s full power, but it’s an exciting early sketch.

By Muddy’s two Aristocrat sessions in the summer of 1949, he was showing off remarkable slide prowess. His solo on “Canary Bird” opens with a frenetic, crazed wallop on the
strings, then unwinds like a madness over several bars. With “Little Geneva,” he introduced fans to his new girlfriend, Geneva Wade, who became Geneva Morganfield over the course of
their nearly quarter of a century together, though never in the eyes of the county registrar. Born September 3, 1915, she was from Lexington, Mississippi, not too far from Rolling Fork.
“I’d come across many, many women, but it seems like you know immediately when you find the one who’s exactly fit for you,” Muddy stated in a later as-told-to feature
article syndicated to black newspapers. “When I met her, even though I was a recording success, there were still people who scorned my music. Geneva encouraged me to ignore them and fight for
what I wanted to accomplish. I’ll never be able to put in words the way I feel about her.” She had two children when they met, Dennis and Charles, and Muddy raised
them as his own. Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie, reared by the couple, remembers hushed conversations about a baby girl who died in childbirth. “It was never
discussed,” she said. “But Geneva couldn’t have children after that.”