Can't Be Satisfied (10 page)

Lomax returned to his seat on the porch. The tension, documented in Lomax’s field notes, was high between the field recordists — whose trip was this? — and John Work stepped to
the doorway where he could watch Muddy perform. The signal was given, and we hear the bouncing, rollicking notes of “I Be’s Troubled” (titled “I’ve Never Been
Satisfied” in John Work’s notes, titled “I Can’t Be Satisfied” when cut in Chicago), slide and strum working together to ride us like a tractor seat through the
instrumental introduction, making the listener want to move, have to move.

This song has been perfected at Saturday-night fish fries and is a sure party pleaser. Muddy’s playing is smooth, and his performance of it must have been something for tired dancers to
watch: the right hand accenting the beat like a drummer, the left hand careening up and down the neck, sometimes sliding and sometimes fretting, always in the right place, always percolating.

The first verse leaves the song’s subject open, but the story unfolds; it ain’t farm trouble what’s bothering him:

“I Be’s Troubled” had barely ended when John Work immediately began speaking from nearby.

Work’s interview was cut short by Lomax, perhaps because the recording disc was running out. Lomax retrieved a second one (leaving an entire side unused) and Muddy played another original,
“Number One Highway Blues,” about the road that ran right by his
front door, the backbone of his universe. Then another interview, this one including Son Sims,
followed by the duo playing their treatment of “The Worried Blues,” popularized in the area by the Mississippi Sheiks. Following that, Muddy sang “Corn Song” a cappella and
then a version of Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues.” The recording session now over, Lomax and Work converted the contraption to something like a jukebox, playing back what
they’d just recorded, with Muddy in both the audience and the spotlight. He heard himself sing.

Afterward, as the equipment was loaded back into the car, Muddy told Lomax that he couldn’t see a big city in his future. As this field trip was preparatory to a more extensive one
scheduled for October, Muddy was likely told to expect their return within a couple months. Discussion about recording his entire band may have ensued. The whole encounter took about seven hours,
from the commissary meeting to Lomax’s brake lights reflecting red on Muddy’s eyes. But in that time, Muddy’s life had irrevocably changed.

Two days after Lomax and Work departed, Muddy dictated the first of several letters he’d send over the course of a year. These letters were spoken to a semiliterate field
hand who picked up spare coin as a letter writer and reader. They are all written on five-by-eight-inch rag paper carefully pulled from a tablet; there is no fraying across the top. The pencil had
each time been freshly sharpened — the heading of “Stovall” was in crisp and thin lead. The handwriting doesn’t quite stay on the lines; the periods that follow so many of
the words may simply be where the writer is pausing.

At the time of the first writing, Lomax was still in the region. The morning after recording Muddy, he and Work went to Money, Mississippi, fifty miles to the southeast, recorded a Baptist
church service, then doubled all the way back and more to catch an 8:30 Church of God in Christ service on the Moorhead Plantation near Lula. All this driving was not good for those precious discs
with their glass base; Muddy’s second disc broke in transit and has not been played since Muddy heard it in 1941.

On the day Muddy wrote his first letter, Work and Lomax were interviewing a man who’d been indentured to Jefferson Davis; the following day, the researchers traveled
to Lake Cormorant and met Son House.

“Did they take?” Muddy Waters asked, using the language he knew — his songs were like a seed taking to the ground.

Half a year later, on March 17, 1942, Lomax wrote to Muddy, asking him to sign a form allowing the Library of Congress to reproduce copies of “Country Blues” and
“I Be’s Troubled” for use in an album. In return, he would be paid twenty dollars. Lomax also wrote, “I think the release of this record will serve to make you known in
quarters where greater use might be found for your talent.”

Muddy would see Lomax again before he would see his money or his records.

Lomax advised him to be patient and forwarded a government form for his signature.

Months passed without an answer. It is hard to know why Lomax ignored these letters; his own account of this time is somewhat self-serving. In 1993, fifty years after his two
summers in the Delta and a quarter century after John Work III’s death, Alan Lomax wrote a book about his experiences.
The Land Where the Blues Began
won a National Book Critics
Circle award, among other plaudits. In the book, Lomax relegates John Work to a single mention, an aside in the preface. (He also makes no mention of his 1941 trip, setting it all in 1942.)

In
The Land Where the Blues Began,
Lomax writes, “Gradually, I began to see Delta culture as the product of the reaction of a powerful African tradition to a new and often harsher
social environment. . . . [B]lack African nonverbal performance traditions had survived virtually intact in African America, and had shaped all its distinctive rhythmic arts, during both the
colonial and the postcolonial periods. It was this unwritten but rich African tradition that empowered the creativity we had encountered in the lower depths of the Mississippi Delta. The error in
African American studies had been to look to print and to language for evidence of African survivals. For instance, musicologists discovered that American blacks performed many European-like
melodies, but failed to notice that the whole performance context — voicing, rhythmic organization, orchestration — remained essentially African.”