Can't Be Satisfied (46 page)

Muddy’s estate is divided among the children he accumulated after Geneva’s death — his children with Lucille and with Lois. The children he raised — his grandkids and
stepchildren — received a small lump sum and nothing else.

Cookie’s children are off living their lives — in college or long graduated. Chandra, her oldest, recently purchased Muddy’s South Side home from the estate and wants her mom
to move in upstairs. Yet Cookie’s suburban Chicago house, which should be quiet as an empty nest, rumbles with young children. She has taken in the children of Muddy’s outside
daughters. “I always knew that Muddy kept the family together, but I never realized how much until he died,” she said. “I hear from these kids’ moms maybe once a year.
I’ve lost respect for some of the others, but there’s no way I cannot love Renee and Joseph, because I raised them.” Cookie is a nurse in the same hospital in which Muddy died. In
the mid-1990s, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. “When they first told me, I felt like them and I said to myself, ‘Oh God, it killed Muddy and Geneva and Bo and they were so dumb
with this I can’t do this to myself.’ ” She has been cancer free more than five years.

Her brother Laurence lives several blocks away. He plays golf on Sundays, drives a fancy car, and is raising a house full of kids with his wife. “We was his grandkids that was there from
birth and these [outside] kids got all his money,” said Laurence. “I got some little animosity, but it’s okay. They have nothing. And I was the one that was
going to be nothing. My house is fine, I’m fine. And my sisters came out okay.”

Mercy Morganfield, Muddy’s daughter with Lois from the Smitty’s Corner days, has become an executive with a major pharmaceutical corporation. “I inherited my determination and
drive directly from him,” she said, “the need to succeed.” During Muddy’s last years, he enjoyed placing two stacks of American green cash on his kitchen table, one for him,
one for her — Miss College — and then racing to count the money. “You’re smart, Mercy Dee,” he’d say, “I don’t have to worry about you,” though
he always, gleefully, won the cash-counting contest.

Several of Muddy’s children have wrestled substance abuse. Joseph recently remarried and showed up to hear Big Bill Morganfield and Bob Margolin play together in Chicago. He is studying to
be a preacher. Charles continues to hang out at Forty-third and Lake Park. He’s taken a room in the area and still lords over the gang of fellas in front of Muddy’s old house.

Big Bill Morganfield has reconstructed his relationship with Muddy through music — the only way he could get to know him, the only way most anyone could get to know him. Bill’s debut
recording,
Rising Son,
features accompaniment from Pinetop Perkins, Bob Margolin, Paul Oscher, and Willie Smith. They perform five Muddy Waters songs and several of Bill’s originals.
“He knew he had a son that played, but to tell you the truth,” said Bill, “I stunk. After he died, I went and locked myself in a room for six years, a woodshed, and I learned it.
Note by note. Measure by measure. All my dad’s records, I learned them. Maybe if I’d been there with him, I’d have been like the rest of them. None of his other kids are pursuing
it. But I got it down.” Bill Morganfield was named Best New Artist at the 2000 W. C. Handy Blues Awards.

Maxwell Street on a Sunday at noon. Seagulls circle overhead, scouring the empty streets for hot-dog-bun tips. The sidewalk stinks of urine — fifty-year-old urine. The
buildings are bombed out. Plywood
covers the windows — “Windy City Board Up.” Vagrant men hawk still-sealed porno tapes from plastic grocery sacks on their
arms.

“If I coulda made thirty bucks, I’da been rich,” said Jimmie Lee Robinson. He’s the blues guitarist who was in Chicago and watched Muddy break out, and later accompanied
Little Walter. He plays guitar today with spurs on his boots, because he can’t find good washboard accompaniment. He walks down Maxwell Street and sees a world that no longer exists.
“Levitt’s put a kosher dill pickle in the bun with the hot dog and boy I liked that taste.” His city is punctuated by hot dog stands, and he discusses the past with relish. He is
something like the inversion of Muddy Waters. He’s done well enough as a performer, releasing a number of albums and touring in America and Europe, but not having achieved the level of
Muddy’s fame, he does not have to authenticate himself every night he plays. His lament — “coulda made thirty bucks” — could have been Muddy’s in 1943, prior to
leaving the South, an unknown blues musician plowing a field behind a mule or atop a tractor and dreaming of the possibilities, the blues falling all around him.

The nearby place where Jimmy Rogers lived when he heard Little Walter playing on the street is now beneath the foundation of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Physical Education
building. Polk and Ogden, where Muddy and Jimmy first gigged, is part of the Chicago Medical School. Hy Marzen’s Zanzibar became a church, but since a fire, the roof has been propped up by
two-by-four boards. Muddy’s first flop, at 3652 Calumet, is erased, a vacant lot in a row of stone buildings, three floors and a basement. Fences in the alley bear flowers, and plots of land
are planted, a country feel in the city. Several of Muddy’s old clubs are beneath an urban renewal expressway. Smitty’s Corner is a currency exchange. The ghost of Maxwell Street past
grows ever more transparent.

Several of Muddy’s former players — the lineup is malleable — reunited in 1993 as the Muddy Waters Tribute Band. They’ve continued to do occasional tours in America and
Europe. In late 1994, they recorded an album,
You’re Gonna Miss Me (When I’m Dead and Gone),
which was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Willie Smith, Calvin Jones, Jerry Portnoy, and Pinetop Perkins, calling themselves The Legendary Band, released seven albums and toured heavily. “Once we was in
Charlotte, North Carolina,” Calvin Jones said, “and we played at a college there. Eric [Clapton] played some big place, he came over where we were playing at, sat in, and we had a good
time.” One by one, the original members departed, leaving Willie Smith to rename the band and continue on. Calvin eventually moved back to Mississippi and lately divides his time between
Senatobia and Memphis, touring when the calls come and playing sessions.

Pinetop Perkins, well into his eighties, has flourished with his solo career. Winner of eleven Handy Awards, he has released a steady flow of his own albums. “I have been up against it in
my life,” he said. “I have played with many a person. But I liked Muddy like a brother.”

James Cotton’s successful solo career was interrupted in 1994 by a bout with throat cancer. Treatment was successful, and he soon resumed his recording career. His 1996 recording,
Deep
in the Blues,
won a Grammy Award, and more recently he and Mojo Buford have been touring together, dueling with their harps, Buford singing the vocals.

Following his break with Muddy, Portnoy toured with Eric Clapton’s All-Star Blues Band for several years and recorded with him on
Blues from the Cradle,
one of the most successful
blues albums ever. Portnoy has since developed a successful harmonica instruction booklet. “Playing with Muddy,” he said, “has made me as comfortable talking to the president of
the United States as I am talking to a wino at the corner of Sixty-third and Cottage Grove.” Muddy as de Tocqueville: if the president can get the blues, the lowest of the low-down can get to
be president.

Though his career has been plagued by missteps and bad juju, Paul Oscher has enjoyed renewed success. In the late 1990s, he formed a new band and began touring. With a very modest budget he
recorded the excellent CD
The Deep Blues of Paul Oscher.
He recently dreamed that Muddy Waters came at him with a Coke bottle, trying to break his tooth. For two days following, he had
pain in that
tooth — though the nerve had been long removed. Muddy was remonstrating him for not playing. “The sound that comes out of the guitar is nothing
without the person playing it,” Oscher said. “It’s just an instrument. But when you put your weight into it, to make it come out with that basic, deep sound — it’s not
the guitar. There’s a spiritual connection.”

The road became a home to Bob Margolin while he was with Muddy, and he’s continued touring and recording ever since. In 1994, he attended the unveiling of Muddy’s postage stamp in
Greenville, Mississippi. “I got off the bus early and went to the food tent, and sitting there eating in a cotton field in Mississippi, a young man who looked exactly like a young Muddy
walked up to me and said, ‘Hi, Bob, nice to see you again.’ The second before I realized it was Joseph scared the shit out of me.” At an Antone’s nightclub all-star
anniversary party, Margolin played a solo set of Muddy’s songs. “When I came into the dressing room,” Margolin said, “Buddy Guy told me, ‘Those are big shoes to fill.
. . .’ Shit, I’m just trying to keep ’em shined.”

Scott Cameron continues to manage Muddy’s estate, and based on their agreement, Scott and then his descendants will continue to collect money earned by Muddy’s songs and share it
with Muddy’s descendants. “When MCA acquired Chess, they had Muddy Waters far in the hole on unrecouped advances and recording costs,” he said. “I sat down with their
business affairs people and I said this has gone on long enough. You’ve got to erase those balances, and you’ve got to give an appropriate royalty fee in line with today’s
standards. At that point MCA was going through all kinds of bad press, and I said, ‘There are two choices, we either cut a deal or you get more bad publicity.’ In addition to
Muddy’s estate, I represented Howlin’ Wolf’s widow, Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Memphis Slim’s widow, even contemporary artists like John Brim, Koko Taylor, and Buddy
Guy. We got them all an up-to-date royalty rate and anybody who had debt, the balances were thrown out and they all wound up getting royalty checks and they have ever since.”

Marshall Chess assumed control of Arc Music Publishing in the 1990s when Gene Goodman retired, and in 2000 he reentered the record business with a label named for the original spelling of his
family’s name, Czxy Records (pronounced “Chess”). As for returning to the biz, he cited a statement his father often made: “Once you’ve had the
experience of a gusher, you miss it.”

Jimmy Rogers was seventy-three years old when we met in his South Side home. Several weeks later, he learned he had cancer; a few months after that he was dead. Such is the tenuousness of
Muddy’s early history, of a life in an oral culture. That evening, he was just back from a southern tour and feeling fit. His living room was well appointed, with contemporary, comfortable
furniture protected from our cognac spills by fitted plastic like that Muddy had in his South Side home. He smoked long thin cigarettes and spoke in a voice like the tickle of worn sandpaper,
weathered without sounding rough. “I keep big pictures of Muddy right there at my bedside, him and Sonny Boy,” Rogers said. “They’re the first thing I see in the
morning.” He was working until his death on December 19, 1997. Atlantic Records released an album that was finished posthumously,
Blues Blues Blues,
which featured friends such as
Eric Clapton, Lowell Fulson, and members of the Rolling Stones. Less than a month after Jimmy died, Junior Wells also passed away.

Mary Austin, the mother of Muddy’s son Big Bill Morganfield, ultimately settled in suburban Atlanta. She remains an active member of society and, after recently retiring, has taken up
modeling. Lucille McClenton was living in a government senior citizen’s center on Muddy Waters Drive when I first met her. Her apartment overlooked the South Side and the lake. She saw cool
blue water and the white sails of boats, but there was no breeze inside. She had a grand view of the projects and of Muddy’s former house. After a few minutes of talking, she got fidgety and
began to wring her hands, picked things up and put them down. She looked young to be in a senior center; her room was in someone else’s name. The lobby of the building stank of urine, the
elevators were the slowest in the world. The sign out front,
MUDDY WATERS DRIVE
, had been warped and bent by the wind. On a later visit, she’d moved to the north side
of town; she said she’d gone drug free and was trying to change her environment.

Marva Morganfield moved back to her small hometown in
Florida not long after Muddy died. “I was beginning to live my life and he had lived his’n,” she
said. “I was just a country girl, maybe I brought out what he was searching for all those years, what he missed after he left from Clarksdale. Mud was my father, my mother, my brother, my
sister, he was all of that to me. I loved him deeply. I hurted when he hurted and there was nothing I could do. He’ll always be here. You’re not going to see him physically, but
he’s always here.”

The blues may have come to Muddy on a dusty road while fixing a “punction” on a car, but an audience will always exist that understands “I can never be satisfied / I just
can’t keep from crying.” On Friday, August 2, 1985, the street that ran by Muddy’s South Side front door was permanently renamed Muddy Waters Drive. On January 21, 1987, Muddy was
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That same year, the “You Need Love” lawsuit against Led Zeppelin was settled out of court; payment to Muddy’s estate was said to be
around $200,000. In Rolling Fork, the town near Muddy’s birthplace, a plaque and a gazebo were erected in his honor on April 21, 1988. That night, at Clarksdale’s Civic Auditorium, ZZ
Top headlined a fundraiser for the Delta Blues Museum’s Muddy Waters exhibit, unveiling Muddywood, an electric guitar made from a cypress plank taken from Muddy’s Stovall cabin. A
thousand fried-fish dinners were sold outside the auditorium — Muddy always did appreciate a fish fry — and the event jumpstarted the city’s interest in its indigenous music.
Hard Again
’s “Mannish Boy” was used in the Hollywood film
Risky Business,
on a Miller Genuine Draft Beer commercial, and in advertising jeans in England. In
1984, a theatrical play entitled
Muddy Waters (The Hoochie Coochie Man)
was produced by Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theater Company and drew crowds for several months. In 1986, it was
revamped for a two-month run, hosted by the Beacon Street Theater. At the 1992 Grammy Awards, Muddy Waters was recognized with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, his song
“(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” was welcomed in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In April of 2001, Muddy was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. He would have surely
appreciated the use, that same year, of “I’m Ready” in a
commercial for the male stimulant Viagra. Muddy Waters was gone, and Muddy Waters was
everywhere.