Can't Be Satisfied (13 page)

Myles Long remembers Muddy reaching for a nail and scratching the hay baler before disappearing. He went to see what Muddy had done, and though it contradicts what is known
about Muddy’s literacy, he is sure that he found scrawled there, whether addressed to his friend, or his former employer, or perhaps to the land all around him — the mother’s dust
from whence he came — “God bless you.”

Muddy Waters was gone.

I
was thinking to myself that I could do better in a big city,” Muddy recollected to writer and friend Pete Welding in 1970. “I thought
I could make more money, and then I would have more opportunities to get into the big record field.”

The only big city on Muddy’s mind was Chicago. Its presence in the Delta was long established. That which did not come from the ground or the furnish came from Chicago, usually through the
catalogs of Sears and Montgomery Ward. Since 1916, the city’s black newspaper, the
Chicago Defender,
had been promoting what it called “The Great Northern Drive”:
“Every black man for the sake of his wife and daughter should leave even at a financial sacrifice every spot in the South where his worth is not appreciated enough to give him the standing of
a man and a citizen in the community. We know full well that this would almost mean a depopulation of that section and if it were possible we would glory in its accomplishment.” By 1930, the
largest population of Mississippians outside the state was in Chicago. And as America’s entrance into World War II rekindled the industrial fires of the northern factories, the need for
soldiers created a manpower crisis. Of the African Americans who went north in the first half of the century, nearly half migrated between 1940 and 1947. By the end of the forties, the median
annual wage for blacks in Chicago was $1,919, while in the Magnolia state of Mississippi it was $439. Field hands took work on the assembly line at the Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Illinois,
making money by making the machines that had taken their work.

“I went straight to Chicago, didn’t travel around at all,” said
Muddy. “I went by train from Clarksdale to Memphis, changed in Memphis, and came up
on the train they call Chicago Nine.” In 1940, Memphis to Chicago on the Illinois Central was a sixteen-hour trip costing eleven dollars and ten cents. If Muddy’s recording payment was
socked away, he could have traveled north on it, with money left to spend.

Small towns dotted the line between Memphis and Chicago, the view from the train window mostly of farmland. The continuity of the landscape would reassure apprehensive travelers, the familiar
topography soothing the first and most violent pangs of homesickness in people who were both nurtured and disciplined by the land.

But somewhere north of St. Louis, the look and feel of the towns changed, the churches becoming taller and narrower in design, with Germanic steeples and turrets. There was more money in these
northern communities, and the wealth was reflected in the architecture. North of Cairo, Illinois, blacks would have moved forward on the train, exercising — many for the first time —
their civil rights beyond Jim Crow’s grasp. A rolling plain feels different from a cleared jungle. And then over the earth’s curve, unfolding like a wide highway, was the capital of
this new kingdom, the tall, storied buildings of Chicago. Chicago was a prairie town, spreading like pancake batter, widening along Lake Michigan, deepening in an endless absorption of farmland and
ethnic settlements (reflected in the diversity of its modern urban checkerboard).

A porter at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago remembered the befuddlement he regularly witnessed: “If there was no one to meet [the arriving passengers], the newcomers seldom knew
where to go. They might ask a Red Cap to direct them to the home of a friend — unaware that without an address the porter could be of little help in a city as large as Chicago. Or they might
employ one of the professional guides who, for a fee, would help them find lodging. Some of the guides were honest, others were little more than confidence men. Travelers Aid and the railroad
police tried to help the migrants and prevent exploitation; but for the newcomer without friends or relatives the first few days were often a terrifying experience.”

Greeted by the red glow of steel mills and the billowy, black, gritty smoke of factories working overtime, Muddy had moved from the world of the born to the world of the
made.

“I had some people there [relatives],” Muddy recalled, “but I didn’t know where they was. I didn’t know nothing.” Leaving Stovall was the fulfillment of a
dream so large he’d been almost unable to face it; he’d barely prepared. From the train station, he took a taxi, showing the driver the South Side address that had been burning a hole
in his pocket, 3652 Calumet. He paid the driver to wait while he rang the bell. “I looked up a address of some boys that we’s raised up together and I came to their house and I stayed
there. I got here on a Saturday, got a job working at [the Joanna Western Mills] paper factory, making containers. I was working Monday. Swing shift, three to eleven in the evening. Man,
that’s the heaviest jive you ever saw in your life.” An arresting statement from a man long yoked to a cotton sack.

“Work there eight hours a day — I never did that before. My paycheck was forty-something bucks or fifty-something bucks a week. You got to be kiddin’, you know. Soon I put in
some overtime, worked twelve hours a day and I brought a hundred and something bring-home pay. I said, ‘Goodgodamighty, look at the money I got.’ I have picked that cotton all the year,
chop cotton all year, and I didn’t draw a hundred dollars.”

The heady times distracted him from the racial tensions underlying his bustling new home. Racism in Chicago was exacerbated by the competition for jobs between blacks and whites. Living
conditions were cramped, Chicago’s South and West Sides bursting with southern black immigrants, many of whom were unprepared and ill-equipped to adapt to city life. Race riots were breaking
out in other parts of the country, and Chicago’s Mayor “Big Ed” Kelly established a Committee on Race Relations. “During the last war we made a study after the riot,”
commented one local African American politician. “This time let’s make the study before.”

The easy money eased Muddy’s transition, but music remained his focus. “I never did go get good jobs,” said Muddy. “I’d get them little old cheap jobs because I
didn’t ever keep one too long. I got a job
at the paper mill [loading] those forklift trucks, and then I got a little job workin’ for a firm that made parts for
radios.” He also worked at a glass factory and as a truck driver, in addition to working the music scene at night. The clubs were active, but the recording studios were quiet. Muddy’s
arrival coincided with a ban on all new recordings (August 1942 through November 1944) decreed by the president of the American Federation of Musicians, James Petrillo; Petrillo was trying to
protect musicians who were losing live gigs to recordings.

Of course there was also the war to worry about and, still steamed, Stovall’s T. O. Fulton made sure that war caught up with Muddy quick. “Before I left,” Muddy recalled,
“I go by Coahoma, tell this man at the [draft] board I got to go to Chicago to take care of a little business. You know they’s calling ’em into the army fast then. I say,
‘If you should need me in a couple of weeks, send the papers to Chicago.’ He gets on the phone, calls the manager at Stovall, and the manager says, ‘We done had this falling
out,’ and
bam,
the papers was there. I don’t know what to do now. So this boy take me over to this little branch board up here and I told ’em my story and the man there
say, ‘Don’t worry, you got a job?’

“ ‘Yeah, I’m working now,’ I tell him.

“ ‘Go on to your work,’ he says. ‘Don’t do nothing till you hear from us. Forget these papers.’ ”

Blues sounds in the early 1940s were still dominated by the Bluebird label, which had been releasing budget-priced 78s since 1933. Their roster had originally included such
country blues artists as Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams, and Blind Willie McTell, but the sounds had become increasingly diluted.

“The blues Waters found on his arrival in Chicago was as well-turned and sophisticated as it often was empty of genuine emotion, and without the latter its guts were gone,” Pete
Welding wrote. Welding was a music critic who founded Testament Records and, while living in Chicago in the 1960s and recording some of Muddy’s finest music, became a personal friend.
“The vigorous, country-based
blues that Chicago had refined, polished, and institutionalized since the 1920s, when the city had been established as the most influential
blues recording center, had been progressively emasculated. . . . The once forceful, highly individualized blues had been diluted by large record firms to glossy, mechanistic self-parody and
tasteless double entendre.” Muddy called it sweet jazz; the style has since come to be called hokum.

Bluebird was, at any rate, a marginal label. When Muddy arrived in 1943, Chicago was a jazz town. Nat “King” Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” was big; also
Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers, and Billy Eckstine. “When Chicago was invaded [by southerners], there was nothing but swing music,” recalled Dave Myers, a pioneering electric
bassist who came up from Mississippi in the 1930s. “Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the big bands. Swing was on the radio all the time, then [you hear] somebody
playing records across the way and it’s all swing. My daddy played that old shoe stump, Mississippi stuff, and wasn’t nothing here relating to that at all.”

“People were going at that time for, I think you call it bebop,” said Muddy. “My blues still was the sad, old-time blues. You’d go in and tell [the club owners] you
played blues, and a lot of them, they’d shake their head and say, ‘Sorry, can’t use you.’ ”

Some jazz clubs had a blues night — gigs that usually went to high-profile names familiar to Muddy through 78s and jukeboxes. Even those gigs weren’t great: according to union
contracts, the pay for established names such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim was around ten dollars per person on a weekend night, or six dollars on a weeknight.

Without the clubs, the only venue open to Muddy was the house party, a get-together in someone’s home where the drinks were cheaper, the food more plentiful, the audience nearer the band,
and where the musicians could establish their reputations. He was on unfamiliar turf, but it was a hustle he knew. “I played mostly on weekends, but I have played seven nights a week, worked
five days, sometimes six days. Plenty of food, whiskey, fried chicken, and they
had bootleg whiskey. I was making five dollars a night playing. That was good side money for
me.” He purchased a suit of new clothes. It was one thing to look country in Memphis; in Chicago, even the cheap clothes were fine.

After flopping with his friends, Muddy sought out his relatives. Chicago blacks were largely segregated into two sprawling ghettos: the West Side and, a half-rung up the social ladder, the South
Side. Within these tight communities were organizations, such as the Clarksdale Citizens Association, that were built around the tight communities left behind. Through their network, Muddy may have
located his cousin Dan Jones, to whose West Side apartment he moved within several weeks of his arrival. Muddy’s daughter Azelene and her mother, Leola Spain, lived nearby.

Not long after, he got his own place. Dan Jones Sr., whom he’d known on Stovall, had a large truck, which he hired out to landlords who needed apartments and houses cleaned out or moved.
One of the job’s perks was scavenging appliances and furniture left behind. Another perk was the advance notice on upcoming vacancies, and when a real estate company had him clean out an
apartment near his own, he slid Muddy right in. Four doors down from Jones, at 1851 West Thirteenth Street, second floor, Muddy faced north, enjoying a comfortable morning light and temperate
afternoons. His rent was cheap; while his cousin paid thirty-five dollars a month, Muddy paid twelve, plus utilities, for four rooms. “Old Man Jones fixed Muddy up,” Jimmy Rogers said
of Muddy’s cousin. “Muddy had furniture all through that house, bed and dressers, end tables, stove, refrigerator, a little radio, and a record player.”

By 1944, Muddy was meeting the established musicians, including Big Bill Broonzy. “I call my style country style,” said Muddy. “Big Bill was the daddy of country-style blues
singers. When I got here, he was the top man.”

In a photograph from the 1940s, a proud young Muddy is shaking hands with Big Bill. Bill’s left arm is around Muddy’s shoulders, which slump as if unable to support the notion of
Broonzy’s embrace. Muddy’s serious expression cannot hide his pleasure — it may be disbelief
— at where he finds himself, and with whom. The folks back
home, he seems to be thinking, will never believe it.

For decades, Big Bill’s character resonated with Muddy. “You done made hits, you got a big name, the little fellow ain’t nothing,” Muddy said in the 1970s about the star
attitude. “But Big Bill, he don’t care where you from. He didn’t look over you ’cause he been on records a long time. ‘Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay
with it, you going to make it.’ That’s what Big Bill told me. Mostly I try to be like him.”