Can't Be Satisfied (14 page)

One of the earliest, most important, and longest-lasting friendships Muddy Waters made when he came to Chicago was with fellow guitarist Jimmy Rogers. Rogers worked at Sonora
Radio and Cabinet Company, where he had been befriended by Jesse Jones, Muddy’s cousin. Jesse and his brother Dan Jr. didn’t play music, but they liked to be around those who did. They
admired Jimmy’s skill — his relaxed and smooth vocal style, his uncomplicated yet intricate guitar chording and strumming. Their friendship solidified when Jesse got Jimmy transferred
to a less dangerous department of the factory. “He got me into that part where my hands wouldn’t get cut off.”

Both Muddy and Jimmy were from the Delta, each raised by his grandmother. Rogers, however, had a more nomadic youth. He was born James A. Lane in Ruleville, Mississippi, on June 3, 1924. Shortly
after moving the family to his home state of Georgia, Jimmy’s father was killed in a scuffle among coworkers at a sawmill. Jimmy’s mother moved them back to the Delta, and Jimmy was
taken in by his grandmother. They moved often, living in several towns in several states: Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

His first guitar was a diddley bow, common in the country — broom wire nailed to the side of a house and plucked. More portable than a wall, harmonicas were inexpensive and accessible, and
Rogers switched to one, learning music basics on that before practicing on other people’s guitars. “My grandmother, she was a Christian-type woman, and man, they’s really against
music, blues, period,” said
Rogers. “After I got of age, my grandmother seen where she wasn’t gonna be able to stop me from trying to play, so she just give
me up, said, ‘Well, okay, you can do what you want to as far as that’s concerned.’ ”

He was soon exposed to live musicians: Houston Stackhouse, Tommy McLennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White. “They was men then,” he said. “I was a youngster.” He too had grown
up listening to Sonny Boy Williamson II. “I would rush home every day around twelve o’clock to hear him. I’d be digging every inch of his sounds.”

Rogers began to earn a reputation, appearing at house parties and playing for “small change, all the whiskey that I could drink, and maybe a dollar and a half cash money.” In
Memphis, he befriended Robert Lockwood Jr. and Joe Willie Wilkins (“My favorite men, I played with them quite a bit, picked up some chords from them too.”) When his grandmother moved to
St. Louis, Jimmy encountered Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis.

As he matured, Rogers felt the pull to move north. “I could feel [racism] at the age of ten,” he remembered. “I could see it going through my grandmother and my uncles and
other people that were older. I could see what they were going through, and I understood what they be talking about. I didn’t like the South. I always said, ‘As soon as I get big,
I’m gone.’ ”

Rogers had family in Chicago and had been there several times before settling permanently in the mid-1940s. Initially, he lived with his great-uncle, but soon found an apartment of his own on
the Near West Side, next to the Maxwell Street Market, which is where he was living when his cousin Jesse brought Muddy by.

“We started talking and he said he played guitar,” said Rogers. “So one weekend, we got together and started jamming over at his house. I knew what I was listening for on
guitar, and Muddy felt the same way. . . . I was playing with different musicians. They didn’t really know what I wanted. I would hum it to them, and I would phrase it on the guitar, run the
notes on the harmonica — they still couldn’t get it. Then Muddy Waters, I listened to him and I said, ‘I know what he need.’ I’d just add sound — what he was
singing,
that’s the way I would play, and give him a feeling to it that he could really open up and come on out with it. It rang a bell.” Rogers didn’t play
with a slide and didn’t need to. “I let Muddy do all that and I just harmonize it and play along, fill in for him and make a turnaround. He liked it that way.”

Rogers had amplified his acoustic guitar with a DeArmond pickup, which fit beneath the strings in the sound hole. “Muddy had a hollow S curve [model] like the Gene Autry guitar,”
said Rogers, who played a Gibson L-5, “and I took him to Eighteenth and Halsted [The Chicago Music Company] and got him a DeArmond pickup put on his guitar, got him a little amplifier, and
then you could get sound out of it.” The pure acoustic guitar was fine in rural Mississippi because there were no sounds at night but the shallow breathing of God at rest, and the steady
percussion of crickets and cicadas. Not so in a Chicago of clanging streetcars, trains, and automobiles out late on a party. Muddy also began using a thumbpick, which further intensified his
volume.

The two men continued to meet at Muddy’s apartment, about a ten-minute walk for Jimmy. “Wouldn’t be nobody home but us musicians,” Rogers said. “We come in, plug up
the amp, get us one of these half-pint or pint bottles and get some ideas. We’d run through a few verses and move on to something else and keep on. Finally, after maybe three or four days
fooling around, you’d be done built a number. On weekends, we’d buy a few drinks and play guitar. So we decided then we’d start this house-party deal over again here in
Chicago.”

Another important and early friendship, though not as long-lasting, was between Muddy and a guitarist named Claude Smith, better known as Blue Smitty. Smitty was born in
Arkansas the same year as Jimmy Rogers, but began visiting Chicago when he was only four.

As he told it, Smitty’s guitar skills came “as a gift.” “One night it was raining,” he recalled. “It was summertime. A guy lived down the road from us and I
got up at about one o’clock at night — everybody
was asleep — and I walked down and asked him to let me use his guitar. He said, ‘What are you gonna do
with the guitar this time of night?’ I said, ‘I’m gonna play it.’ And he let me have it, we wrapped it up to keep it from getting wet, and I went home and sat on the porch
and started playing them six strings. And my mother get up and come to the door, she hear me out there: ‘When did you learn how to play the guitar?’ I said, ‘Tonight.’ And
we sat up all night and listened to me play that guitar. I was about fourteen.”

In the mid-1940s, Smitty, about twenty, found work in Chicago as an electrician. Muddy met him through the gregarious Jesse Jones. At the time, his music was a mix of southern gutbucket blues
and fancier finger work, blending the likes of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and jazz master Charlie Christian.

“I went down in Jewtown to buy some guitar strings,” said Smitty, referring, like Greektown, to the colloquial name of the immigrant market neighborhood on the Near West Side.
“It started raining and we were standing under the canopy. This one guy was going in the music store and he asked me if I would hold his guitar. He had five strings on the guitar and I just
started playing it. This fellow was standing next to me, he said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Sure I can play.’ He said, ‘I got somebody I’d like for you to meet.
Then maybe you can teach him something.’ I said, ‘Who is that?’ He said, ‘His name is McKinley Morganfield, he’s my cousin, but they call him Muddy Waters.’
”

Smitty went to Muddy’s apartment. “Muddy was sitting down in the middle of the floor and he had the pickup out of his guitar, and he was trying to fix it,” Smitty recalled.
“The ground wire had come a-loose, it needed soldering. So I soldered the wire in his pickup and put it back in the guitar. Muddy played first. He had a cheap little amplifier there, but it
sounded pretty good. He said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play.’ ” They were like an eager couple on a first date. Muddy handed Smitty his guitar, and Smitty
retuned it from the Spanish to standard tuning. Smitty remembered Muddy saying, “I don’t know anything about that other tuning, I play with slide all the time.”

Motivated by Muddy, Smitty found steady work, buying a Gibson amplifier and then his own DeArmond pickup. “So Muddy and I started practicing together. I tried getting
him away from that slide, ’cause I could play single-note picking. And I would teach him how to play the bass to what I was playing. He always had a good sense of timing. And from then on,
every week, sometimes four or five times a week, in the evenings, we’d get together.”

Himself inspired, Muddy began taking two guitars to house parties, one tuned to standard for picking, and one tuned to Spanish (open G) for sliding. “He really learnt me some things on the
guitar, too,” confirmed Muddy. “I played mostly bottleneck until I met Smitty. It was a very, very good improvement he did for me, because I didn’t have to try to do everything
with the slide by itself.”

The world of South Side blues was small. Smitty and Jimmy Rogers had already been performing together — with Jimmy on harmonica, a piano player called King, and a drummer
known as Pork Chop. “I was playing with Smitty and I got a few ideas from him,” said Rogers. “When Muddy came to Chicago, we started hanging around together, him and Smitty and
myself.”

Smitty was cursed, however, with a good day job. Unlike Muddy and Jimmy, he wasn’t stone committed to music, and though he was a natural talent, he often wouldn’t show up. “If
Blue Smitty wasn’t there,” said Rogers. “I’d have to play the guitar. If he was, I’d play harmonica.” Drummers were scarce. The country blues had never demanded
one — a guitarist stomping the wood floor resonated well enough. In Chicago, the paying gigs were jazz, and no blues drummers had developed. So the second guitarist would loosen his strings
to play bass parts and keep rhythm.

Calvin Jones, who later joined Muddy’s band as a bassist, stumbled onto the newcomer at a small nightspot a few blocks from Muddy’s apartment. “I went to a skin game [cards],
gambling in someone’s apartment, and I heard this guitar, he had his slide going. So I went to the window and he was right across the street. I left the game and
went
down there. He had a harmonica player with him. It was an acoustic guitar what Muddy had. It was a weeknight, they didn’t even have a bandstand, they were just sitting in their chairs
playing. Wasn’t nobody in the joint, three peoples maybe. I asked him what his name was. ‘Muddy Waters.’ He said it real cool.”

“We’d call it scabbing,” said Rogers. “You hit here, you set up with asking this guy that owns the club if he wouldn’t mind you playing a few numbers — quite
naturally it was good for his business, he would say okay. You’d play a number or two, they’d like it, you’d pick up a buck here, a buck there.”

Before long Blue Smitty managed to land the band a proper club gig. “So one day I was going to get a haircut” — Smitty’s career-changing stories have the most prosaic of
beginnings — “and while I was in this barber shop at the corner of Ogden and Twelfth, this one guy said to me, ‘While you’re waiting, play us a piece or two.’ ”
Smitty did, and the guy told him, “I’d like to have some guys that can play as good as you, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. What are you gonna charge me for playing?” Smitty
reported back to Muddy and the trio was hired for five dollars apiece per night. The response was good; they added Thursdays.

As his fan base grew, Muddy must have heard time and again, “Hey, you’re pretty good, you ever record for anybody?” That none of his peers had heard of the Library of Congress
probably slowed him not at all from pulling out a copy of his record, maybe wrapped in cloth so it wouldn’t break, his name typed on the label, visible if you squinted because he’d worn
it out playing and showing it off. Hell yes he’d recorded.