Can't Be Satisfied (59 page)

163
“Now I know that the people in England”: Palmer,
Deep Blues,
p. 258.

163
“I realized I could play guitar”: Trynka,
Mojo
(April 1998).

163
post-Levittown affluence: By the decade’s end, the Second City theater group, with Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Ed Asner, was
putting on a new, progressive kind of comedy show in Chicago.

164
“Folksong: ’59”: At Lomax’s “Folksong: ’59” in Carnegie Hall, April 3, 1959, Muddy brought
Spann and Cotton and was provided a New York rhythm section. He did “Hoochie Coochie Man,” then belted out “Walkin’ Through the Park” before being joined by Memphis
Slim, who did an instrumental that featured he and Spann trading licks on two pianos. Muddy stayed for Slim’s two remaining numbers, providing sinuous backing on Slim’s mellow
interpretation of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” and a lonesome slide feel to “How Long Blues,” the Leroy Carr song he’d told Lomax was the first he’d tried
to learn. He leaves no doubt that he’s mastered it. The songs were originally released on the 1959 United Artists album
Folk Song Festival at Carnegie Hall,
and have since been
reissued as part of the Capitol Blues Collection
(Chicago Blues Masters: Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim)
on a CD that includes a set of studio collaborations the pair recorded in New York a
couple years later.

164
“Big Bill Broonzy had recently died”: Broonzy died August of 1958, and Muddy, along with Spann and Clay, had been among
the pallbearers. Brother John Sellers, Tampa Red, and Sunnyland Slim were the other pallbearers.

165
Atlantic Records: Following Ertegun’s visit to Smitty’s Corner, Atlantic engaged Chess in a discussion about Muddy
recording two dozen tracks with Atlantic’s John Lewis; each label would release an album. (Gart,
First Pressings Vol. 8
.)

165
“increasing numbers of whites — Americans and Europeans”: The winter before, in 1957, the Belgian fan Yannick
Bruynoghe and his wife documented their prolonged stay in Chicago.

166
“I believe whitey’s pickin’ up on things that I’m doin’ ”: Murray,
Shots,
p. 187.

11: M
Y
D
OG
C
AN
B
ARK
1960–1967

Newport:
Richard Kurin, in
Smithsonian Folklife Festival
(p. 105), provides a brief history of the Newport festivals:

“[By the late 1950s], they started offering gigs at Carnegie Hall and Newport,”
Francis Clay remembered. “Muddy had never heard of them. He said,
‘Man, you’re driving me crazy with that Newport stuff.’ ” A festival atmosphere was not Muddy’s normal environment, nor was the outdoors, nor was the daytime, nor the
Northeast. The little pay barely made the great distance worth it. He was convinced by the other names on the bill: John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Rushing, Sammy Price, and fiddle and guitar duo Butch Cage
and Willie Thomas.

European Friends:
The Frenchmen Demetre and Chauvard were in America from September 10 to October 10, 1959. In a review of their book on its republication, Alan Balfour wrote,
“Just how much information they gleaned from all those with whom they spoke is astonishing; information which laid the foundation for all future research into Chicago blues.” (Balfour,
“Land.”) (
Land of the Blues
by Jacques Demetre and Marcel Chauvard is available through Soul Bag / CLARB, 25 rue Trezel, 92300 Levallois–Perrett, France. 176 pages, 94
photographs. Price: 190 French francs [postage included] payable by IMO or Visa / Mastercard.)

A longtime friendship was established the same year between Muddy and Georges Adins from Belgium. Adins had followed Muddy’s 1958 British tour, talking with him in hotel rooms. Arriving in
Chicago from the South — he’d hung with Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston and Sonny Boy Williamson in east St. Louis — Adins was invited by Muddy to stay at the Lake Park house,
and he spent two weeks there. He fell right in, traveling to gigs with Muddy, joining him after Smitty’s to visit a Jimmy Rogers set at Pepper’s, then coming home to eat Muddy’s
corn bread and eggs in the wee hours. Muddy made him Cookie’s godfather.

Georges and I hit it off quick; in September of 1998 he wrote, “I have of course a lot of family shots as well as pictures taken at club appearances in case your book would contain any
pictures. Most of my collection is pasted in albums. . . . Maybe you can let me know how many you want for the book, if you prefer family pictures and others, if you want them glossy or matte, and
also what size.” News of his death came in May of 1999, as our friendship was blooming. I have tried, diligently but unsuccessfully, to locate his trove of material. Muddy’s estate,
Muddy’s family, and various of Georges’s friends have some of his photos, but these amount to a small percentage. Fellow researcher Robert Sacre has also tried to find the family, and
he holds money in escrow as he searches.

Paul Oliver remembered Muddy’s pride during his interview. “He didn’t use any complex language but he’d stop and think and reply in a very considered way. It wasn’t
exactly spontaneous but I got the impression that it was important to him, and he respected the fact that I was a BBC reporter; he knew what the BBC was because he’d visited England.”
Oliver had further observations about other band members: “At the Tay May I became aware of how well Pat Hare played. His face was kind of scrunched up and he looked very, very mean onstage.
I thought he was about fifty and actually he was about thirty-five; it was something deep-seated in his personality. Muddy liked to maintain the tension in his performance, Pat Hare worked up to it
and then dropped back. Cotton also wouldn’t play all the time. He liked to take two steps forward and cup his hand around the mike and scream out the choruses and then step back. When I saw
Little Walter, he wouldn’t stop playing. Walter came alive through his harp. He was difficult the rest of the time.”

On Chris Barber’s American visit, he sat in with Muddy in Gary, Indiana. “I
knew how to play those blues,” he said. “At the end of the first set, I
put my trombone down, and this elegant black girl — the only people in America who looked smartly dressed to us Europeans were black people, everyone else wore Bermuda shorts and floral
shirts — she leaned back in her chair and said, ‘Say, are you Chris Barber?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Is that your record, “That Petite Fleur”?’ I said yes.
She said, ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Robert Koester also remembered Barber sitting in. “I went to the washroom and a guy came up to me and said what the hell is that strange
horn that guy is playing?” Barber remembered: “Another funny thing, Muddy bent down on one knee, and he hitched up his trouser so it wouldn’t get dirty, but he hitched up the
wrong one. Also, Muddy would always talk confidentially to you, covering his mouth with his hand, but he’d cover the wrong side, blocking his mouth instead of concealing it.”

Barber and Ottilie were also at Muddy’s Carnegie Hall show in 1961 and followed the band to their penthouse suite at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. “They were playing up there till
five in the morning,” said Barber. “Muddy sent his bodyguard [Bo] out to buy food periodically, and they got Ottilie to make bacon and eggs.” When they’d slept it off the
next afternoon, the musicians drove back to Chicago the way they’d come out: directly. Just another one-night stand.

Harold Pendleton, Barber’s partner, also visited Chicago: “Our drummer Graham Burbridge was asking Francis Clay about triplets, because no one over here knew how to play them. As a
result of our trip to Chicago, we left skiffle — Lonnie Donegan was by then singing songs like ‘Does Your Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight.’ We found Cyril
Davies, who played mouth organ in a folk club, and we found Alexis Korner, who understood blues, and we added them to the Chris Barber Band for a blues set at the Marquee on Wednesday nights.
Because our clubs were not licensed [for alcoholic beverages], an evening had two sets, with an interval set in between, so the main act could go to the pub. But the twenty-minute interval kept
getting extended and we eventually gave Cyril, Alexis, and Long John Baldry Thursday night. Alexis could never find a drummer, Graham Burbridge was the only one who could play that style —
because he’d been trained at Smitty’s Corner. They did eventually find a drummer in the name of Charlie Watts. The Rolling Stones became the interval group on Thursday
nights.”

Europe in the 1960s:
Willie Dixon told this great Sonny Boy story in his short-lived column, “I Am the Blues,” in
Living Blues
:

Joe Boyd visited Chicago a month before the 1964 tour and saw Muddy at Pepper’s. “We were the only white people in the place. That tour was right along a cultural fault line for the blues. Within a
year or two, the black audience fell away and the white audience soared and that cannot help but change the music.”

In a 1978 backstage interview, Muddy was asked by a reporter for
Dark Star
magazine about the Rolling Stones. “They helped turn the white people around in America,” Muddy
answered, “recording our records and putting our names on them. When I first came out on records, white people didn’t want their kids to buy my records, called it ‘nigger
music.’ Said, ‘Blues is nigger music.’ ” The interviewer interjected, “Race music,” and Muddy answered, “They wouldn’t say ‘race,’ say
‘nigger.’ ”

Paul Butterfield and Newport:
An Elektra Records executive flew to Chicago to hear Butterfield’s band at Big John’s on New Year’s Eve, 1964–1965. The
group was racially mixed, with Elvin Bishop, Jerome Arnold, Sam Lay, and, in short order, Michael Bloomfield. “I heard the most amazing thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Paul
Rothchild said. “I said to myself, ‘Here is the beginning of another era. This is another turning point in American music’s direction.’ ” (Von Schmidt and Rooney,
Baby,
p. 248.) They promptly cut “Born in Chicago,” which sold 200,000 copies and established the band’s reputation.

“What we played was music that was entirely indigenous to the neighborhood, to the city that we grew up in,” Butterfield said. He continued: