Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
by Robert Gordon
379 pp.
New York
Little, Brown $25.95
Among the epic generation who forged Chicago's electric blues a
half-century ago, Muddy Waters stands as a giant. Other giants share his
virility and sensitivity--Howlin' Wolf could outbellow Muddy and Sonny Boy
Williamson's harmonica could match his slide guitar quaver for quaver--but
Muddy Waters' blues have a elegant grace, an Ellingtonian twinkle, that
sets his music apart from, if not above, that of his peers.
In Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, Robert
Gordon tells his story with empathy and insight.
Muddy was born McKinley
Morganfield on April 4, 1913, deep in the Mississippi Delta, the only son
of two teenagers, Berta Grant and Ollie Morganfield, a muleskinner and
part-time blues singer. Berta died soon after, Ollie moved on to a new
wife, and Berta's mother, Della Grant, brought up young McKinley, nicknamed
Muddy, with her own son Joe in a log cabin on the vast Stovall plantation,
four thousand flat acres of cotton fields that spread east to the far
horizon and west to the great river just north of Clarksdale .
Though known to be generous with the "furnish" of seed and tools he
supplied his tenants, Colonel Stovall ruled over his land like a feudal
lord. Berta and her two boys, like African-American sharecroppers all over
the South, were technically free but lived as serfs bound to the plantation
by custom, intimidation, and perpetual debt. Muddy grew up a bright, bold
young man, looking for a way out of a lifetime chopping cotton. The keening
guitars and crying voices of Son House and Big Joe Williams at local
jukejoints, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson on record, tugged at
Muddy's soul. He sat transfixed at the feet of local masters, apprenticed
on harmonica, then began to play slide guitar at plantation parties (some
nights the white folks gathered to watch and listen). By his late twenties,
playing blues (and pop tunes like "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Red Sails in
the Sunset") was earning Muddy a steady flow of silver coin and folding
bills, income nicely supplemented by the related hustle of selling
moonshine.
When a strange white man came to Stovall in August, 1941, asking
for him, Muddy thought the revenuers had found his still. No, said the
white man, he was Alan Lomax, and this was his assistant John Work, a
professor from Fisk University in Nashville; they wanted to record his
music for the Library of Congress. As he set the glass transcription disc
spinning, Work asked the singer to state his name. "Name McKinley
Morganfield, nickname Muddy Water, Stovall's famous guitar picker," he
proudly replied. When they finished recording "Country Blues" and a
half-dozen other tunes, Lomax turned a few dials and played the record
back. "Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard....my own
voice." Waters said years later. "I thought, 'Man, I can sing.'" When Lomax
sent Muddy $20 and two copies of the record, Muddy took one to a local
cafe. "I carried that record up the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just
played it and played it and said, 'I can do it, I can do it.'"
Indeed he could. Two years later, after falling out with a new
overseer, Muddy made the move a whole generation was making, north to
Chicago. He scrabbled for a few months at day labor then began to support
himself playing nights in South Side honky tonks, putting together a
trusted band that included guitarist Jimmie Rodgers, pianist Otis Spann,
and harmonica wizard "Little Walter" Horton. Muddy's hit records on the
fledgling Chess label, the first, "I Can't Be Satisfied," in 1948, then
"Hoochie Coochie Man," "Rolling Stone," and "I Just Wanna Make Love to
You," made Muddy Waters a national blues star in the 1950s. Chuck Berry and
Bo Diddley, bluesmen a dozen years younger than Muddy, took his primitive
electric sound one big step closer to pop music in 1955, and rock 'n' roll
was born.
For a few years the rambunctious offspring eclipsed its parent, and
discouraged by diminishing crowds, Muddy stopped playing. Folkies revived
his career in the early 60s and introduced him to white audiences; late 60s
rock bands like the Rolling Stones (who named themselves from his song, as
did the magazine), took Muddy's music to the world. A horrendous car
accident in 1969 hospitalized him for months and deadened sensations in his
hands for months more, but Muddy recovered and continued to play bold
original music through the 70s. He led a series of sizzling bands to clubs
and concert halls around the world and won Grammies with red-hot discs
featuring youngsters like Eric Clapton, who felt honored (and nervous) to
be jamming with their idol. After he died in 1983 of lung cancer, Muddy lay
three days in state, dapper in a white linen suit and purple striped shirt,
as friends and fans lined up for blocks to pay their respects.
Gordon, a Memphis-based music writer, has a sparse documentary
trail to follow (Muddy never learned to read or write), but he brings his
subject to life with good use of his own and other interviews with Muddy
and his circle, and with well-researched details--though the overlong notes
hide many good bits that could well have been integrated into the text.
Gordon's prose can turn mannered ("The question snapped Muddy like a broken
guitar string"), but if his metaphors are not always in the right place,
his heart is, and his descriptions of the fierce sounds Muddy and his men
created are eloquent and accurate: "Walter's bass notes are like a pulse:
you can feel the beat as it approaches, as it rides through you, as it
passes. Muddy picks the six strings, raw and visceral, a deep world of hard
blues, ominous, horrible..."
Gordon places Muddy in music and social history without becoming
pedantic and, equally important, places the man in a world we can see and
feel. Muddy was a sharp dresser, a champagne drinker, a womanizer, and
Gordon paints him both sweating on stage and relaxing the next day at home
on the South Side, eating ice cream and watching his beloved White Sox on
the bedroom TV while musician friends rehearsed in the basement and
children played on the stoop.
Muddy Waters remained a man marked by his youth under Jim Crow,
Gordon points out, a man who installed the Chess brothers as new Colonel
Stovalls who would make sure he had his "furnish" of Cadillacs and cash if
he didn't question their accounts. A lawsuit settled privately in the late
70's did win Muddy a chunk of unpaid royalties that he didn't have long to
enjoy, but those close to him knew that music mattered more than money to
Muddy Waters. "Mud was the type of person," recalled his wife Marva after
he died, "he would want you to celebrate the way he was....He was a
happy-go-lucky person. Muddy loved to entertain. When he got in front of a
large crowd, he had more fun that the crowd did."
Michael Lydon, a writer and musician, is the author of Boogie Lightning and
Ray Charles: Man and Music