Can't Be Satisfied (24 page)

Top pay on the road was around five hundred dollars, though usually closer to three hundred — from which the whole band had to be paid, plus drivers, gas, and wear on the tires. Band
members
earned between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars each working night; they paid their own travel expenses and food. (The penurious sax player Bob Hadley carried a
hot plate and often finished other people’s meals.) They stayed in all-black hotels, costing between ten and fifteen dollars a night, sometimes less. “Rooms was cheap,” Cotton
said, “and girls was plentiful.”

Cotton usually drove the station wagon. “In our car, Spann’s sitting in the front seat with me, snoring,” said Cotton. “Bob Hadley, sax player, would be sitting behind
me, asleep most of the time, and Elgin would be sitting on the other side, eating carrots all night, like a rabbit, so he could stay awake. He was a good company keeper.” The station wagon
carried the gear — the suitcases filled Muddy’s capacious trunk.

Muddy was a friend to his band members, but he was also their boss. After a show, he’d have a drink, maybe a bite to eat, discuss what needed discussing, and then return to his hotel room,
where the door closed on him and his road wife. Jimmy Rogers, as bandleader and disciplinarian, also distanced himself. Reefer was not allowed; tardiness to the bandstand or to the departing
vehicles was not tolerated. Uniforms had to match. “One night,” Cotton recalled, “the dry cleaner had took the handkerchief out of my pocket and forgot to put it back. Jimmy
Rogers fined me. They were that strict. They wanted a band and they had one.” How great the distance traveled from Stovall. Posing for John Work’s camera, Muddy did not ask Son Sims to
pull up his right sock to match his left. Now he had an assistant to observe such matters.

Though Spann served many of the duties of bandleader, he had no interest in officially assuming such a position. “Spann didn’t care nothing about being the bandleader,” said
Cotton. “He didn’t want to have to stay sober.”

Harvest time was always wild in the South. Money was flowing, and a loose audience pushed the band. There might be long drives between gigs; there might be difficulty finding a hotel that would
accept cash from black patrons; there might be a bar owner who didn’t want to pay, or who wanted to flip a coin for double or nothing; or
there might be a particularly
good party after the show, where there was a piano, and whores, and whiskey, and Spann got to drive the eighty-eight keys like a Cadillac on the open road.

In Tuscaloosa, on a tour without a road wife, the whole band got thrown into jail. The trouble started, Cotton recounted, when “this guy bought us all this corn whiskey.” Everyone
went on a bender. At some point, Muddy hid his money, then shacked up with the hotel maid. When he awoke, he accused her of stealing and went at her with one of her buckets. The cops came. A
frantic call to Leonard Chess resulted in the appearance of a Tuscaloosa lawyer, who finally wrangled Muddy’s release. “I seen Muddy slap his girlfriend or something like that, but that
was very very uncommon,” Cotton said. “To go out and grab the hotel maid like that, that was uncommon too.”

The South was where racism held strongest, but the South was also home. After a gig in Georgia, the band hit the highway. “I was driving the station wagon, following Muddy,” said
Cotton. “We pulled into Rolling Fork. I thought, ‘This is Muddy’s hometown.’ He just went right through the little town, took us about five seconds, on out to his
father’s house. He was driving a big white Cadillac. We got in about five or six o’clock in the morning, old man Morganfield came out there and looked” — Cotton furrowed his
face in imitation of Ollie’s look — “looked again, then said, ‘That’s my son.’ Him and Muddy hugged one another. I enjoyed seeing them do that.

“Muddy’s daddy was a bit taller than he was, but you could see that Morganfield resemblance, and I guess from him working the field, he looked a little bit harder than Muddy did.
They lived in a farmhouse, Muddy’s father and his sister [Luella McNeil], and if it rained, it rained right in on you. Muddy went in and went to bed. There wasn’t no entertainment but a
big ole persimmon tree in the front yard. I cut some wood, I got Muddy’s car and wanted to go into town, the old man went with me. He showed me little stores and stuff, which there
wasn’t much to show. We got some ribs, started a barbecue in the yard. I asked him could he play the guitar, I’ll never forget that, and he pointed to Muddy, said, ‘No, that
boy!’ He was proud.”

At home, the South Side house stayed rocking. Phones ringing, meats frying, and greens boiling, the TV broadcasting a baseball game with the volume high
or no volume at all, sometimes a shoot-’em-up (“Somebody with a gun shootin’ at one another,” Muddy said, “I can watch that all day”). Muddy, if he wasn’t
going anywhere, stayed in cotton pajamas or a black T-shirt and black boxers. And always there was music. Spann, when he wasn’t seated at the Lake Park Liqueors bar, was playing the day away,
making up songs in the basement, Cotton always ready to jam, Elgin nearby, Jimmy Rogers stopping in.

The basement was Muddy’s musical epicenter, though he was rarely down there. He kept musical instruments leaning against the wall, some album covers tacked above them. Whenever a song
didn’t go right on a gig, the band would regroup in the basement the next day and Spann would go over it with them. The rehearsal room was long and hexagonal, with light from the one small
window blocked by the large gas meter. The informality provided a comfortable place to let ideas germinate, though Muddy’s participation lent a new meaning to “sleeping on it.” He
usually stayed upstairs, and if he heard something he liked, he’d holler down. When Muddy would actually come down, according to Cotton, “We knew that the next day or the day after
we’d go into the recording studio. He’d be done learnt the songs because me and Spann would sing them. Spann was the master, but Muddy would take the credit. Spann didn’t care.
Spann was a whiskey-drinking piano player. His interest was playing.”

Geneva made the place a home. She liked flowers and plants and painted the house with light, bright colors. She appreciated the step up the ladder, and as she could afford it, she purchased new
furniture, French provincial for the living room. The bedroom she shared with Muddy was wallpapered with a calm yellow, a small pattern repeated on it. A clean house, a pretty house, was important
to her; to battle the detritus from the constant flow of people, she covered the new chairs and sofas in firm, bubbled plastic. Drunk guests and rambunctious kids could spill what they would.

“I went to Muddy’s house to take a record to Spann,” Billy Boy Arnold remembered. “Muddy’s house was well furnished and real comfortable. He
was wearing a nice beautiful robe and pajamas and they were looking at the ball game. Muddy’s wife had some steaks big as your forearm, and gravy. Cotton came in the back door and went in the
skillet or pot and got one out of there, started eating it.”

“You could always go raid her pots,” remembered Jimmy Lee Morris, a Delta guitarist who joined Muddy’s band as a bass player. “She’d see Mud going in the kitchen.
‘Don’t eat up all my goddamn food.’ ”

“The house was beautiful,” said James Cotton. “Being around Geneva was a pleasure. She was a good cook, a very nice lady. I used to bring her home some Old Grandaddy. We all
used to bring her a bottle.” Either because of her preference for bourbon brands, or because of the way she mothered Muddy’s band, Geneva came to be called — by most everyone,
including Muddy — “Grandma.” (Muddy, at the time, was referring to himself as the “Old Man,” and that name also stuck.)

When Muddy wasn’t working, and between dates, he was a homebody. He liked to fix a big bowl of black walnut ice cream, pour a grape Nehi over it, and make a soup. “He’d lay in
the bed all day and look at TV,” said Cookie, Muddy’s granddaughter who moved into the house before she was three years old. “And he’d eat ice cream. Sometimes he’d go
on the front porch, but usually he’d be cooking or just be cooling out in his bedroom. When he was there.”

The phone rang all the time, and Geneva, who took care of the business around the house, knew not all those soft, cooing voices could be calling her husband about booking clubs. “They got
along okay but it was a lot of friction because of outside women,” said Cookie. “He might be home five days and three days were good and then someone might call or he’d stay out
all night.”

“I defended him in a number of paternity cases, probably four or five,” attorney Nate Notkin remembers, “and I never lost one. We always proved that the woman had other
contacts.” In the mid-1950s, “the woman” — Muddy’s outside wife — was named Mildred.
Muddy was around forty, she was about twenty. She had
the nickname “Bubba” and was unable to get enough of her man. Around long enough to have a child with Muddy — nicknamed Poppa because he looked like Mud — Bubba’s spot
was eventually taken by Dorothy.

Dorothy was a dancer, good looking and young, worked as a waitress on the West Side. “Kind of drove the old man crazy,” Cotton said. “She was attractive, it wasn’t hard
for her to get a man. Muddy was kind of jealous.” To keep better tabs on her, Muddy got her a South Side apartment around the corner from his house. Cotton drove Muddy there after work one
night, and she wasn’t in. They sat inside drinking gin. When their bottles were empty, they went back for new ones. And still no Dorothy. “Muddy’s pissed off now,” said
Cotton. “Just as we walked out the door, there was someone who drove past in a Studebaker, and the lady in the passenger seat ducked down. Muddy said, ‘There they go.’ Muddy had a
brand-new Chevrolet station wagon, red and white. Had about ten miles on it. We took off behind the car, Muddy driving. I don’t think the other guy knew the neighborhood, and we were so close
up on him, the guy hit a post. Muddy run into the back of him. The guy jumped out running, Muddy told me to catch him. I knocked him down, brought him back. Muddy said, ‘Hey, this is the
wrong people.’ The woman in the car wasn’t Dorothy. The guy was white, must have been scared out of his mind. Antifreeze and stuff was running out of Muddy’s brand-new car. Muddy
said, ‘Let’s get away from here.’ We jumped in the car, left them there.” Ah, home sweet home.

“Only a few artists,”
Billboard
wrote in 1955, “such as Muddy Waters, Dinah Washington, Memphis Slim, and B. B. King have what is known in pop stores
as a standby market — that group which will buy an artist rather than the tune.” Muddy was also the focus of a feature article syndicated to black newspapers around the country; it told
the story of his career in his own words. In May of that year, Muddy cut his tenth top-ten hit. “Mannish Boy” was a slightly
modified version of a tune he’d
heard a new Chess artist named Bo Diddley performing for Leonard at an audition. “We were playing and Little Walter came in and Muddy came in,” said Billy Boy Arnold, Bo Diddley’s
harmonica player. “Muddy was always coming to Leonard for one thing or another. Muddy wanted to take ‘I’m a Man.’ He heard it and he figured, ‘This guy is nothing,
give me that song.’ ”

“Bo Diddley, he was tracking me down with my beat when he made ‘I’m a Man,’ ” said Muddy. “That’s from ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ Then I got on
it with ‘Mannish Boy’ and just drove him out of my way.”

“Mannish Boy,” like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” was built on Muddy’s sexual persona, the song’s growling tone perfectly suited to Muddy’s declamatory
delivery. “No matter what you do, some things come out all different, just your own. It’s like singing. Your face, and what you’re doing on your face, will change the tone of your
voice. That’s where my tone is.” “Mannish Boy” is a facial workout. Pulling his cheeks so tight his eyes squint, rocking from his knees to give his throat an extra vibrato,
wagging his head side to side like a dog shaking off the wet — against the stop-time accompaniment — Muddy sounds like a man possessed, a dog that meows, a cat that barks. He quivers
and shivers, all sex; he grunts and swaggers, all school-yard boast; he moans and hums, cocky in his triumph. As he sings, girls squeal with delight, a party he can handle: