Can't Be Satisfied (15 page)

And while his fellow rural city dwellers had found little kinship in the jaunty, unemotional, ragtimey sounds that predominated, they loved music that evoked the sawdust on a juke-joint floor,
the dust that the mule plow kicked up, the emptiness of a lonely country road. Muddy had never aspired to play with urban flash, basking instead in the slow country blues feel, keeping it as his
foundation even as he modernized it. It was Muddy’s own deal with the devil: he left his native community but gained a larger one, a wealthier one that could purchase the nostalgia and
authenticity of his music.

Much of that modernization came via a new instrument. The electric guitar was the Delta bluesman’s answer to the mechanical cotton picker. “We were playing our
little clubs and a ‘cue-stick’ [acoustic] guitar wouldn’t answer there, not in a liquor club,” recalled Muddy. “My uncle Joe [Grant] had been in Chicago a long time
and everybody played those electric guitars. He told me I ought to play one, and he bought me one. It wasn’t no name-brand electric guitar, but it was a built-in electric guitar, not a pickup
just stuck on. It gave me so much trouble that that’s probably why I forgot the name. Every time I looked around I had to have it fixed. Finally it got stoled from me in one of them little
neighborhood clubs, and the next one I got me was a Gretsch, and that’s the one I used on all my early hits.” The DeArmond had allowed for a longer sustain in the notes, but the
electric guitar was a whole new beast. It affected the approach to singing and the role of the other instruments. With it — and in particular with Muddy taking it on — the Chicago
blues, the urban blues, the modern blues, were nascent.

“It was a very different sound, not just louder,” said Muddy. “I thought that I’d come to like it — if I could ever learn to play it.” The difference was not
in the music Muddy created, but in how he created it — how his fingers attacked the string, how his slide worked the neck. “That loud sound would tell everything you were doing,”
he explained. “On acoustic you could mess up a lot of stuff and no one would know that you’d ever missed.”

The sound was heavy, especially when all three guitars played together, intertwined and forceful — Muddy sliding, Jimmy laying patterns under him, and Smitty punching up the bass parts.
Each could trade off roles (except for the slide), and their vocal styles were varied. And strangely, wonderfully, behind the closed walls of a club in the later hours of the evening, at the end of
a long day, a heartless day, an exhilarating day, a calm resembling quiet could settle on the city and the electrified sound could evoke a downright backcountry night.

Eddie Boyd, kin to Muddy and raised near Stovall, had come to Chicago in 1941, and he played a sleek, smoother style. “He wanted me to play like Johnny Moore,”
said Muddy, “which I wasn’t able to play the guitar like. He wanted it to be a kind of sweet blues.” With Eddie’s guidance, Muddy and Smitty joined Local 208, the
“Negro” chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, and fell into a good gig. “Jimmy Rogers, he was having girl trouble during that time, so some way or the other he got out
of the band,” remembered Smitty. He and Muddy began playing with Boyd. A sign went up at the Flame Club:
BLUES
,
BLUES
,
AND
MORE BLUES
. When Boyd took another gig in nearby Gary, Indiana, Muddy and Smitty got Sunnyland Slim, another popular pianist, to replace him. That trio left the Flame and went to the Purple
Cat on Madison.

Jimmy Rogers got his act together about the time Blue Smitty was losing his, so Muddy never lacked accompaniment for house parties and small clubs. Nor did he lack accompaniment in his
apartment. In the mid-1940s, Muddy was shacking up with Annie Mae Anderson, whom he’d known at Stovall. “Nice-looking girl,” said Elve Morganfield. “At Stovall, she was
married to Sam Anderson. Like I said, Muddy was a Casanova, he was happy-go-lucky. He had ’em all. He loved them young women, oh yeah.”

In Chicago, Muddy was becoming his own man. His grandmother died in 1946, and home may never have seemed more distant. He was a beneficiary on her insurance, quickly spending the money on a
luxury he’d grown accustomed to in Mississippi. “He got his paycheck and with that other little money he inherited he paid the down payment on the car,” Jimmy Rogers remembered.
“It was a rust-colored Chevy, nineteen forty two-door. Musicians, blues players, didn’t have cars too much then, and that’s what really started him into going around.” John
Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson began hiring Muddy for gigs in Gary, Indiana, and other distant places.

Sonny Boy’s skills on the harmonica thrust the instrument from back pockets to center stage. He had a good-time
bomp bomp abomp bomp
sound. “If you liked blues, you liked
his,” said Muddy. “He had that particular little twinkle in the voice that got to people.” One
name for the harmonica is “mouth organ,” and his
mastery on the twenty-five-cent novelty item brought it to a level of respect shared by the piano. When notes were held, the harmonica could lay a foundation not unlike a keyboard, but the
instrument really shined when riffs punctuated or bolstered lyrics. “Mississippi saxophone” was another name, and blues bands made it the poor man’s horn section. Sonny Boy
developed a choking style, not squeezing the life out of the harmonica, but bellowing his life’s breath into it. The bends and slurs — making the instrument say “wah wah”
— gave it personality. A song such as “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” could have both a sense of humor and an undercurrent of terror, all built around a hook that made it wildly
popular.

Sonny Boy drank on his gigs and couldn’t keep a band together. “Eddie Boyd and myself and Sonny Boy was playing together,” Muddy said. “Sonny Boy was mostly doing all the
singing and they wanted to keep me in the background. But Sonny Boy’d keep a-gettin’ high, we got to try to carry it on. So one night Eddie done got tired of singing all night, and
Sonny Boy got drunk — Eddie know I could sing ’cause we raised together — Eddie said, ‘Why don’t you sing one?’ I could see he was sung out. I pulled the mike to
me, opened this big mouth up, boy, and the house went crazy, man. I sang one of [Lowell] Fulsom’s songs, ‘Trouble.’ ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble, all in this world I
see.’ And I was talkin’ quietly to the people, quietly, and they went nuts. And Sonny Boy heard that noise goin’ on, he jumped up, grabbed that harp and taken that mike. ‘My
baby left me, left me a mule to ride.’ ” Muddy laughed. “He seen how I brought down the house. We worked around quite a little bit together, till Sonny Boy got drunk and got us
fired. Sonny Boy wouldn’t do right. He had that big name too, all them big records out, but he loved whiskey better than he did his work, man.”

They stayed friendly until June 1, 1948. While walking home from a gig, Sonny Boy was robbed. His assailant, never identified, took his wallet, his watch, three harmonicas, and most of his life.
Despite intercranial hemorrhaging, Sonny Boy crawled the last block
home to his doorstep, where his wife found him — and presumed him drunk. Three hours later he was
dead.

By now, the Petrillo ban on recording had been lifted, and the recording industry had awakened to a new and different scene. Talent scouts once again scurried from club to club,
but instead of the smooth, sappy music from between the wars, they found another new sound had taken root in the raucous clubs. New artists had reinvigorated old ideas, and new record labels were
springing up to give them a shot. After three years of trying, Muddy’s devotion to music, to the late nights playing to spilled beer, the next day’s ache at his day job — paid off
in 1946 with his first two commercial sessions. Muddy’s first session was for an independent producer; the second had him in the ranks of the major labels.

From the first, only one track was issued. “Mean Red Spider,” produced by J. Mayo Williams, the pioneering African American independent producer, was more representative of the
existing Chicago sound than of the new developments Muddy was forging. He sings lead, but his guitar is buried beneath a squealing clarinet, a busy saxophone, and a ragtimey piano. The presence of
these reed instruments reflects the influence of the big-band sound; the fact that there’s only two and not a whole section indicates the style’s diminishing sway.

“I remember that session,” said Muddy. “Somewhere here in Chicago we did it. We got half sideman [half the union-scale sideman’s rates]. We didn’t get forty-one
twenty-five. Forty-one twenty-five was sidemen’s then, eighty-two fifty was the leader. I musta got twenty-something dollars out of it.”

Muddy’s name isn’t even on the record. “Mean Red Spider” was attributed to James “Sweet Lucy” Carter and His Orchestra. Mr. Carter may be featured on the
A-side (“Let Me Be Your Coal Man”), but he’s nowhere on Muddy’s track. “James Carter, I don’t know,” said Muddy, looking at the label copy brought to him
in the 1970s by blues researcher Jim O’Neal, who was confirming what sounded like Muddy’s presence. “But that is me. I got a little guitar in there somewhere,
I hear it every once in a while. I thought that record was drownded in the river.”

Through acquaintances made at that session, Muddy was introduced to “Baby Face” Leroy Foster, a skinny, smiling guy who’d hit Chicago from the South earlier that year. Foster
was a skilled guitarist who also had a knack for drumming, and unlike the jazz players, he shared the juke-house aggressiveness that Muddy and Jimmy were putting into electric blues. With drums,
the group landed a gig on Roosevelt Road and their following continued to build. Baby Face switched between guitar and drums, Jimmy could pull out his harmonica, or all three could play guitars and
sing. “When we discovered what was going down,” Muddy remembered, “then I said, ‘Wow, man! We got something here!’ ”

This boost in popularity brought him to the attention of producer Lester Melrose, who was responsible for “the Bluebird sound,” the chiffon blues — what Muddy called sweet jazz
— that was waning in popularity. Melrose, a white Illinoisian in his fifties when Muddy arrived, had been the dominating force on the blues recording scene for the past decade and a half. He
was responsible for much of the roster at both major blues labels, RCA (which controlled Bluebird) and Columbia.

On Friday, September 27, 1946, Muddy cut eight tracks for Columbia Records under Melrose’s supervision. Muddy was leader on three tracks, backed vocalist Homer Harris on three, and backed
pianist Jimmy Clark on two. There are no horns on any tracks. The arrangements, with piano, drums, and bass, might have seemed crowded in a Mississippi juke joint, but they were positively spare
for Chicago. Booking three heavy-throated, unknown vocalists, Melrose was clearly looking for the next big thing. Stylistically, he was on target — Muddy’s vocals would be imitated by a
generation — but Melrose’s roots in sweet blues bog these tracks in the past. In his introductions, Muddy almost pushes the sound into the future: his guitar is prominent and hitting
heavy, but when a second guitar should kick in, it’s instead the piano, sounding like yesterday and miked to play lead.

Muddy exhibits great confidence in his playing. His amplifier is
turned up and, when appropriate, he lets the distortion rip. On Harris’s topical “Atomic Bomb
Blues,” Muddy and pianist James Clark trade the hammered triplets that would become a feature of Muddy’s later band. Cognizant of Melrose’s sophisticated tastes, Muddy kept his
slide in his pocket. “That country stuff might sound funny to ’em,” he later remembered thinking. His phrasing, nonetheless, is imbued with a Delta feel; Muddy has Mississippi at
his core. He also has Chicago at his fingertips; his comfort with the piano indicates that, through regular scabbing, he and his cronies had become accustomed to larger lineups.

As fall turned to winter and 1946 became history, Muddy watched these sessions sit neglected on Lester Melrose’s shelf. The Jimmy Clark tracks came out (“Blues singer with piano,
string bass, drums, and guitar,” with no names given on the label), but Muddy’s, along with those of Homer Harris, remained vaulted for almost a quarter century.