Can't Be Satisfied (2 page)

He named us in a way, and we basically wanted to turn the world on to Muddy and his like. This little band of ours had finally found a gig, and we put our last few pennies in for this ad in a
magazine. We called to tell them where we were playing at and they said, “Well what’s your name?” And on the floor was
The Best of Muddy Waters
and on the first side was
“Rollin’ Stone.” So we named ourselves the Rolling Stones. I always felt that Muddy ran the band, that there was a real connection.

What Muddy was doing at Chess in the late forties and in the fifties was transforming the blues to meet the needs of the society. It had been acoustic blues before World
War II; after that, they started shouting it out in Chicago. The whole city was louder, and the music became city blues. They were inventing it as they went along because nobody knew anything about
the electric guitar or how to record it. It was just beautiful experimentation.

Muddy was like a map, he was really the key to all of the other stuff. I found out Muddy and Chuck were working out of the same studio and on the same Chess label, and there was the Willie Dixon
connection too. Then I had to find everything of Muddy’s that I could and at the same time find where Muddy got it from. So I sat and listened to Robert Lockwood Jr. and to cousins and
relations. Via Muddy, I found Robert Johnson, and then it all started to make sense.

Twentieth-century music is based on the blues. You wouldn’t have jazz or any other modern music without the blues. And therefore every pop song, no matter how trite or crass, has got a bit
of the blues somewhere in it — even without them knowing, even though they’ve washed most of it out. This music got called the blues about a hundred years ago, but the music is about a
feeling and feelings didn’t just start a hundred years ago. Feelings start in the person and I think that’s why the blues is universal, because it’s part of everybody. Muddy is
like a very comforting arm around the shoulder. You need that, you know? It can be dark down there, man.

I
t’s been one hundred years since McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield came screaming and crying onto this Mississippi earth, poor
and common as dirt, a future as dim and forlorn as one could imagine in a post-slavery “democracy”. Yet he made himself into an icon, a recording artist and performer whose work has
transcended generations, whose art has translated across lands, and remains, decades after his death, powerful and exciting.

Blues music as we know it had yet to coalesce in 1913. The keening sounds of the slide guitar were beginning to proliferate, and the rhythms and elements that would become the blues were blowing
across the delta like a storm, gathering strength and shape. Muddy’s maturity coincides with the codification of the blues, and what he took from Robert Johnson and Son House to make his own,
stands today as a bedrock of modern music.

Even that foundation, however, has begun to shift. Through the second half of the twentieth century, all music seemed a response to what Muddy (and Sam Phillips in Memphis, and a few others
throughout the region) created; if it wasn’t an imitation or variation, it was something like “industrial” music—a purposeful reaction to the roots. Now, in a world caught
on the internet, international influences have expanded and machines—software versions of what once were called “synthesizers” and now can be played with the same lettered keys
with which this introduction is being typed—make it easier to forge new sounds with new patterns. Blues remains a vital root, but the tree has grown, the expanse of branches shading new
areas.

What world, what life and opportunities, would Muddy face if born in today’s Mississippi Delta? The poverty that once dominated the delta remains a prominent factor
in daily life, though diluted by occasional industries—catfish farming, automobile manufacturing, Viking Ranges. Casino gambling has spread through the delta, giving employment to some,
robbing most of both their meager wages and their hopes, fueling unemployment and thus also the youth gangs that maraud ever more freely. The odds for a life better than the minimal sustenance of
sharecropping are probably better than they were, though that’s balanced by the depths of the new horrors: gangs, guns, methamphetamine and the disintegration of the village.

Muddy had an entrepreneurial drive and a desire to make his mark, but the gumption for hard won goals is so easily numbed nowadays in a culture that kills intentions and distinction with
kindness and ease, that dilutes what’s original with the prefabricated, that paves with plastic the untrodden paths almost immediately upon their discovery.

A new industry is growing in the delta, and all across Mississippi, and it sheds a light of hope: Cultural tourism. The state that fought recognition of its dark-skinned citizens as even being
human has come to embrace their culture. What once was despised is now embraced: The state sponsors the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of historical markers placed in urban and rural areas, in
historical locations and on vacant lots, amid the urban bustle and away off in the middle of nowhere, all commemorating contributions to the blues, all heralding this fundamentally African-American
expression. As well, there’s the B. B. King Museum, with hundreds of schoolchildren bussed in daily to see consecrated and praised the life of a poor dirt farmer, the pride as plain as the
once-institutional efforts to keep him down; the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland, music festivals, home tours and shrines of all kinds, large and small. Some
are privately funded, others bankrolled by taxpayers. The memorials and honors extend past music to the political heroes who were gunned down, to the
Freedom Riders, to
anonymous street protestors and to members of international communities who helped shape the delta—Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, Italian, Mexican, Native American. The past in Mississippi is
being confronted, and it’s not being whitewashed.

The Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Muddy Waters song, recently charged over $800 for a single evening’s ticket (that’s official prices, not scalpers)—a sum Muddy
would have loved to have earned for a whole year’s backbreaking labor working dawn to dusk in the cotton fields. B. B. King doesn’t charge as much as the Stones, but his success
indicates the continuation of the recognition and honor Muddy received in his lifetime.

Bluesmen and blues women, blues songs and blues fans—they continue to be born every day. Their provenance is no longer restricted to a geographical area nor the result of immediate
environment. And the reason for this enduring life of the blues is the same as it ever was: honesty. Blues tells fundamental truths, sings of hard times and hope, relieves burdens and celebrates a
brighter tomorrow (actually, a brighter tonight). The blues, in an uneven, lovely exchange, is nourished by the chaos and unhappiness in life, and in turn provides us with a poetry and the courage
to continue.

A bit of shopkeeping: the 1940 census, released since this book’s initial publication, further affirms Muddy’s birth year as 1913. The census is certainly not
infallible, but it is interesting to see the early information revealed.

Also new since original publication are a related book and documentary. I was taken by the John Work and Alan Lomax research trips, and with Bruce Nemerov I published my findings in a
Vander-bilt University Press book,
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study,
1941–1942.
This book includes the previously
unpublished original research papers by the three African-American scholars so often overlooked: John Work, Lewis Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. As well, I made a documentary,
Muddy Waters
Can’t Be Satisfied
, which features great
on-screen interviews and some astounding Muddy Waters performances. I hope both of these, along with the reissuing of this
biography, will introduce Muddy and the blues to new fans and will also enrich the understanding of those who’ve been lost in this groove before. It’s a tough world, and the blues helps
us through it.

– Robert Gordon, Memphis, Tennessee

January, 2013

M
uddy Waters was barefoot when he got word a white man was looking for him. It was Sunday, the last day of August, 1941. The cotton had bloomed and
was set, the crop as it would be until picked in about a month. Muddy, like the other blacks who farmed a piece of someone else’s land in Mississippi, was enjoying his lay-by. Soon,
he’d be working that cotton from sun to sun.

Word reached Muddy before the white man did. “Uh-oh! This is it,” Muddy remembered thinking. “They done found out I’m sellin’ whiskey.”

He went to neutral ground, the plantation commissary, away from his home where his hooch was hid. The white man found him there. “I went there, I said, ‘Yassuh?’ He said,
‘Hey, hey, don’t
yassuh
me. Say no and yes to me.’ He said, ‘I been looking for you.’ I said, ‘For what?’ ‘I want you to play something for
me. Where’s your guitar at?’ I say, ‘It’s down in my house.’ ‘Come on, get it. I want you to play for me.’ ”

The white man’s name was Alan Lomax. He was twenty-six years old. Muddy was twenty-eight. “I couldn’t figure it out when he first got there,” Muddy said. “I
didn’t know whether he was one of them smart police coming after me, or what the heck was goin’ on. I couldn’t handle this white man going to put me in
his
car and drive
me around, going into my house. I say, ‘Uh-huh, revenue man trying to get into me.’ ” But it was hard to peg this Lomax character. His accent was strange — Texas, but
watered down by Washington. And he had a strange manner. He asked Muddy for some water and then astonished the Mississippian by sharing. “Same cup I drink out of, he
drinks out of that too. I said, ‘Not a white man doing this!’ No no, this was too much, he going too far. But my mind still thinking, ‘Oh, he’d do anything
to see can he bust you.’ ”

Hovering in the background, accompanying Lomax but kept at arm’s length, was the man who initiated the historic expedition, John Work III, a black man. Work mostly stayed quiet. In the
deep South, he would be perceived as nothing more than Lomax’s flunky. And Lomax did little to counter such a perception. Work’s presence intensified Muddy’s suspicions, as did
the absence of Captain Holt, the Stovall Plantation overseer. Plantations did not take kindly to “agitators” of any sort coming on their land, and anyone not a resident and not known
was an agitator until his presence was explained. The same grapevine that warned Muddy he was wanted would have first reached Captain Holt. Muddy was well liked on Stovall, both by the tenant
farmers and by the Stovall family. Whenever revenue agents had previously come around, Colonel Stovall himself had come to warn Muddy. If he were carted off, the hands would be losing not only one
of their bootleggers, but also their most popular musician. But Holt’s absence meant this revenuer’s visit was approved, and Muddy realized the farm was sacrificing him to the
government, a pawn between two kings.

He was a peculiar revenue agent, this white man. Instead of extracting a badge, Lomax went to his car, pulled out a Martin guitar, and began to pick some blues. Muddy could now see what
he’d only glimpsed before: the entire backseat and most of the trunk were occupied by a recording machine, a disc cutter, and a generator that converted the automobile’s DC current to
AC. The recording device also had a playback arm, allowing Lomax to share what he’d been given before taking it away.

“He brought his machine,” said Muddy, “[and] he got his old guitar and he started playing, and he said, ‘. . . I heard Robert Johnson’s dead and I heard you’s
just as good and I want you to do something for me. Will you let me record some of your songs, and I’ll play them back and let you listen to them? I want to take it to the Library of
Congress.’ I didn’t know what did he mean by the Library of Congress.”

But enough was adding up: this stranger’s interest
was
music and not whiskey stills. Word about the turn of events quickly reached Son Sims, Muddy’s
musical partner, and instead of keeping far from there, he now hurried to Muddy’s house, guitar in hand. “We got his stuff out of the trunk of his car,” said Muddy, “and all
his long batteries and set ’em up on my front porch, and I was in my front room with my guitar, my little microphone, and he ground his wire down through the window and he went to
work.”

The discs were thick slabs of glass (metals were conserved for military use during World War II) sprayed with a black acetate coating, into which a lathe cut grooves that captured the sound
transmitted through the microphones. These discs were sixteen inches across; the standard LP is twelve inches and a 78 is ten inches, so these were unlike anything Muddy had seen on a jukebox or in
a store. Their imposing size underscored the importance of the event.