Can't Be Satisfied (8 page)

In 1933, Percy Thomas recalled, Muddy got into Sims’s group as a singer. Before long, the Son Sims Four started to call on Muddy’s other skills. His harmonica playing was a nice
complement to their sound, and his guitar work — well, he had his own guitar and he was learning fast. “We played juke joints, frolics, Saturday-night suppers, we was even playing white
folks’ parties three or four times a year,” said Muddy. “My boss really liked that kinda carrying on. He’d give a party and he’d get me to come do his things for him.
Sometimes the fish fries didn’t have enough money to pay the four or five of us — just two of us had to go. Me and Son Sims, we’d play there sometimes
by
ourselves. Or somebody’d sit in with us, maybe me and Lewis Ford. Some harp player come by and we let him jam. We really just have a good time.”

On May 1, 1935, twenty-two-year-old Muddy had his first child, Azelene. Her mother was Leola Spain. “She was a little brown-skinned country girl,” said Magnolia
Hunter. “Kinda smallish, wasn’t heavy.”

“She was a young little girl,” remembered cousin Elve. “Nice figure, about five foot three, nice grade of hair. She wasn’t over sixteen. Muddy went for beautiful women,
young women. That’s all I ever knew him to like. Leola was married to a man named Steve, and she was going with a guy named Tucker. Her husband caught them together. It gets
complicated.” And Muddy was in the middle. Mabel, tired of being on the outside, left Muddy, not even bothering with divorce papers, and moved to Chicago.

Though he ultimately established a household and kept a home for twenty years with a wife in Chicago (and several outside women), he never lost touch with Leola. She followed him to Chicago, and
there from the West Side to the South Side. “They always had a special bond with each other,” said Amelia “Cookie” Cooper, the couple’s grandchild, “all through
his life until his death. He kept a very good tie with my grandmother because of the child that they had and then once the grandchildren came it made the bond even closer.” Throughout all the
women Muddy picked up and discarded, Leola was the only one with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship.

As Muddy was becoming more accomplished and more confident, he saw many of his friends and acquaintances releasing records. Tommy Johnson began recording in 1928. Robert
Nighthawk’s first recordings featured backing from Big Joe Williams. The Chatmon Brothers, Skip James — his running buddies, his moonshine pals — were now recording artists. Muddy
sought the popularity of Leroy Carr and the force of Son House, but insisted on an identity of his own. He
knew it was possible to take the influence of others and create
something unique. He’d seen one of his neighbors do just that: Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson’s two recording sessions, before he was murdered in 1938, have made him the most popular of the early blues artists. He was born, raised, and he died in the Mississippi
Delta. His legend, even during his lifetime, grew around the sudden facility of his playing; reportedly he’d made a deal with the devil. But what has kept his name at the fore is his command
of the form, his artistry with the three-minute song. Each of the twenty-nine songs in his legacy is carefully crafted — the musical hook, the lyrical image, the totality of the piece —
a conscious recognition of the recording process, its limitations, its possibilities. He recycled melodies and words, sometimes nearly the whole of a song, but he reshaped them into creations of
his own, singularly passionate manifestations that have reached across generations.

Johnson recorded and was killed before Muddy faced a microphone, but they were of the same musical generation, each descended directly from Charlie Patton through Son House. “I loved
[Robert Johnson’s] music,” Muddy said. “I first heard him when he came out with ‘Terraplane,’ and I believe ‘Walkin’ Blues’ was on the other side. I
always followed his records right down the line.” Muddy had only seen him once, on the street in Friar’s Point, and the experience had been overwhelming. “People were
crowdin’ ’round him, and I stopped and peeked over. I got back into the car and left, because he was a dangerous man . . . and he really was using the git-tar. . . . I crawled away and
pulled out, because it was too heavy for me.”

Little commercial recording was done in the Delta; musicians were taken to Chicago, or the East Coast, or Grafton, Wisconsin. Sometimes labels would hold sessions in hotels — in Memphis,
in Jackson, in Dallas. Muddy, like most Delta residents, would make occasional trips to Memphis, the largest city in the region. There, on the Delta side of town, was Beale Street — Harlem of
the South — where black lawyers and dentists offered their services alongside bookies and hookers. And in the center of Beale Street was a park.
Music and card games
were plentiful. On weekends it was an open-air market where you could find anything fresh: fruit, corn liquor, women, dope. On weekdays, it was harder to find fruit.

“Memphis,” said Muddy, a pause afterward indicating the enormity of the city. “M-E-M-P-H-I-S, only thing I can spell yet. I can’t even spell Clarksdale. Memphis was up
north. Beale Street was the black man’s street. Memphis was like you was going almost to California. Get in a car going to Memphis, you’d change drivers: ‘You drive some,
I’m tired.’ That road wasn’t very good and your tires wasn’t very good. Me and Son Sims, sometime we’d go up to Memphis just to come back for the big word:
‘We’s in
Memphis
last night.’ ”

But as big and wild and slick as Memphis may have been, Chicago was of a different order. “Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was going to Chicago and get a record,” Muddy
said. “He says, ‘You go along and you might get on with me.’ I thought, ‘Oh man, this cat is just jiving, he ain’t going to Chicago.’ I thought going to Chicago
was like going out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard [1937], he had a record out.”

By 1938, when he was twenty-five, Muddy’s reputation had spread more widely; he was known for playing “Bluebird Blues,” which he learned from the recent Sonny Boy Williamson
record, featuring Big Joe Williams on guitar. He played in Friar’s Point for a man who’d taught him to fix cars. He played the Trump Club in Clarksdale, where tamales and watermelon
slices were sold on the street. “I got big enough to start playing for the white things,” said Muddy. “I used to play Howard Stovall’s store for these [county agricultural]
agents. A white dance, you could play a waltz all night long. And then you’d play them something a little jumpy, end up with ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World’ and they would get
down.”

By then, much like when her boy played in the mud, Muddy’s grandmother had to reconcile herself to her grandson’s ways. “My grandmother, she say I shouldn’t be playing, I
should go to church. Finally, I say I’m going do this, I’m going do it. And she got where she didn’t bother me about it.”

Yet, despite the occasional urban foray, Muddy’s world remained
the backwoods. “Muddy stayed in the country a long time,” said Honeyboy Edwards,
who’d been rambling far and wide. “When he come to Clarksdale, that’s the brightest place he was.”

In the late 1930s, when the Silas Green traveling tent show set up in Farrell, three miles south of Stovall, Muddy attended. A traveling show was a major attraction, an alien culture bringing
new ideas. Unlike the medicine shows, where the music was a vehicle for drawing crowds to whom elixirs with high alcohol contents could be sold, the Silas Green show was professional, a show built
around music. These performers didn’t just count on tips, they had regular wages (or the promise thereof). And the show was on wheels — it was a way out of town, a way off the
plantation. But Muddy’s brush with Silas Green was limited to Farrell. “I didn’t follow the show. I played with them right there for a night or two. We had five or six of us, we
made a lot of noise out there.”

Even if he had had the desire to move on, Muddy wasn’t sure where he should go. “I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, ‘Can I make it with my
guitar?’

“ ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doing now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago.’ ”

Indeed, Chicago was still a jazz town, accustomed to sophisticated arrangements. RCA’s Bluebird label, its budget subsidiary that also targeted the black audience, had begun recording some
of the rawer blues artists in 1933, but its focus (and its successes) was sweeter, ragtimey numbers, blues with the dust shaken off. Artists such as Tampa Red, the first Sonny Boy Williamson, and
Big Maceo Merriweather were playing a more up-tempo, danceable sound; Robert Johnson’s records had found an audience, but the buyers were not so much popular music fans as dedicated blues
heavies. The growth of jazz reflected the penetration of African American culture into broader American society.

Then there was St. Louis, where, it was said, blues changed its stride. The saying fits, referring not only to the stride piano stylings popular there, but also to the city’s location.
During the Great Migration, when southern people used all available resources to strike out
for a new life up north, passing St. Louis meant getting over the hump. Located
halfway between Memphis and Chicago, St. Louis was a city of size — more industrial than Memphis, not as overwhelming as Chicago — and it had its own black city within a city: East St.
Louis. St. Louis was both familiar and daunting, and it invigorated the travelers with a thrill and new excitement; it put a little more bounce in their step, a little more pep in their stride.

Muddy knew of many great blues artists who called St. Louis home, including Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw (the devil’s son-in-law), and Charley
Jordan. Pianist Walter Davis lived there, and Muddy had many of his records. If “going to Chicago was like going out of the world,” then St. Louis was the last stop within Muddy’s
stratosphere. It was conceivable, reachable, possible. And so Muddy set out for an exploratory trip away from home but not out of this world.

“In 1940 I went to St. Louis for a little while,” Muddy said, “and didn’t like it.” In his first taste of life outside the Mississippi Delta, he heard people
speaking in mild midwestern accents and he encountered a town with more progressive ideas about race relations, though many of the faux-slavery attitudes of Mississippi were certainly still
present. But perhaps most frustrating to Muddy was that his reputation did not precede him and that, musically, he would have to prove himself all over again.

“He said he met Henry Townsend there, and some other musicians,” Jimmy Rogers, an early Chicago friend, remembered Muddy saying. “He was just up there scouting around, fooling
around, trying to get hooked up with some people.”

“I was trying to be a musician there,” Muddy said. “I stayed maybe a couple months or so. I wasn’t gettin’ enough work with my guitar, went back to
Clarksdale.”

Clarksdale was familiar, but it couldn’t help but seem even smaller and more isolated after St. Louis. Traveling shows beckoned and Muddy passed. St. Louis opened her arms and he just
shrugged. Muddy Waters, it seems, could not be satisfied.

B
y the early 1940s, Muddy was famous in his “circle we was going in,” the skinny strip of Delta that fanned out from Clarksdale to the
Mississippi River along Number One Highway. There were plenty of little back-road juke houses along there — he’d never want for a job — but it wasn’t exactly international
fame.

Muddy Waters’s first real break into the outside world came in the summer of 1941, during a field recording trip under the combined auspices of Nashville’s Fisk University and the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He made his first recordings that summer and then several more the following summer when the group returned; a year after that, with the courage of a
recording veteran, he would leave the Delta for Chicago. These encounters were perhaps the most crucial to his future career.