Can't Be Satisfied (3 page)

The fellowship was christened, and the distrust dismissed, with a toast. The whiskey warm in everyone’s belly, Muddy’s first recording session began. “So I just went along and
made that ‘Country Blues,’ ” said Muddy. “When he played back the first song, I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that
afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. I thought, ‘Man, I can sing.’ Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that
record up the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ ”

More than half a century has passed since that encounter, and geography is losing its importance. Cultures are increasingly the same everywhere. Where once the Mississippi Delta
was a unique place — poverty made it a quarantined culture long after television and other mass media had penetrated similar outposts — now a person can live anywhere and grow up with
the blues.

Muddy’s boyhood home, where Lomax recorded him, still stands — though not in the same place. It used to be on the county road that runs along the edge of Stovall Farms (as the former
plantation is today known); I was raised in Memphis, the capital of the
Mississippi Delta, and I remember more than once detouring to drive by Muddy’s cabin. In the
1980s, a tornado blew off its roof, and the Stovalls, for safety reasons, removed the rooms that had been added over the years, leaving just the single-room cypress-planked structure that had been
built by trappers around the time of the Civil War. Tourists began to remove splinters and hunks of those planks as mementos. Between the treasure hunters, the insects, and the natural elements,
the cabin began to disintegrate. In the late 1990s, the House of Blues, a chain of nightclubs, leased the structure from the Stovalls, dismantled it, transported it, cleaned and treated the wood,
created a museum display within it, and sent it on a tour; it became itinerant, like the blues musician it sheltered, though collecting more money than he did. In the course of his life, Muddy
became emblematic for so much — not just the blues generally, but also the twentieth-century migration from a southern rural culture to a northern urban one, the evolution from acoustic music
to electric music, and the acceptance of African American culture into American society. And now his cabin assumed its own meaning: the commodification of the blues.

The blues, a music and culture once denigrated and dismissed by white society, has become big business. Some of the world’s largest corporations have used blues stars or their music to
help sell their products. Musicians, painters, and artists of all sorts cite the music’s influence. The art is exquisite, but the conditions that created it were heartbreaking. One truth
about the blues today remains little changed over the decades: it is still considered a music rooted in impoverishment.

Perhaps that’s one reason why the cabin has been given mythic meaning, while Muddy’s home in Chicago, the place he lived when he made his most famous and memorable records, and made
his money, has been virtually ignored. When we think of the blues, we often think of cotton fields and summer heat. But the reason the blues has affected so many different kinds of people in so
many different cultures, the reason the music still speaks to us, is that the blues isn’t about place so much as circumstance. House of Blues may prefer the imagery of Mississippi Delta
shacks, but the truth is that America is
full of dead ends. The first time I saw Muddy’s Chicago home, it stood vacant and dilapidated. A group of local men, ranging in
age from fifteen to a hundred and fifteen, sat on the abandoned house’s stoop and in pieces of chairs scattered around the front yard. Each of their faces told a million stories.

One of the men was Muddy’s stepson Charles Williams, who was raised in the house. Charles, known through most of his life as Bang Bang — “Bang Bang,” he explained,
“he might do anythang” — still lived there. There was no electricity, no running water, and the windows and doors were boarded up. But, when it was not too cold outside, this was
where Charles called home. I traipsed behind him through the vacant lot next to Muddy’s, stepping over broken glass and the detritus of a decaying neighborhood, into Muddy’s backyard.
“This is the carport,” he said, standing beneath a low-roofed structure that would, by the time of my next visit, have blown over in the wind and been swept away as if it never
existed.

Like the front, the back was all boarded up. The four or so stairs that should have led to the landing outside the back door were gone. Charles scrambled smoothly up. I followed, with less grace
and practice, using the space between bricks as a foothold; Charles pulled me up by the shoulder, even though I didn’t think I needed the extra help. We were backdoor men. “Step
back,” he said, though there was little room for me to do so. He pulled at a corner of the board that covered the rear entrance, stooped, and like insects between floorboards, we crawled
inside the shell of the home of Muddy Waters.

Our eyes adjusted to the dim light that seeped in. The cupboards were in place over the kitchen counters, bare. The pantry was open. There was a hole in the middle of the kitchen floor wide
enough for a large person to fall through. We moved across the room, stepping carefully. A hallway extended in front of us, sunlight breaking through rooms on the left, falling onto the right wall.
The building felt charged with emptiness, a powerful vacancy. Dust stirred in the air, as if someone had just passed through.

He took me to the room where Muddy slept, where Muddy lay in bed and watched the White Sox on TV. The wallpaper farthest from
the window was still a pretty yellow. There
was a pattern on it, something like a diner’s Formica countertop. It wasn’t hard to imagine a lamp in the corner, a night table, a bed — the feeling of life and activity was
nearly palpable. We moved into the front room, where Memphis Slim and B. B. King and Leonard Chess and James Cotton sat and visited and sipped whiskey and gin and beer. Where the photograph of
Little Walter graced the mantelpiece for nearly two decades. Where music and singles and albums were discussed and debated and breathed and created. Now this house, like Charles, like so many
people in Muddy’s life, was on the verge of crumbling to dust.

It would be easy to look at the irony of what is embraced and what is discarded in assembling the myth of Muddy Waters and say, “That’s the blues.” It
is
easy to put
Muddy in that cabin, easy to relocate him and his rural beginnings around the world, a neat stitch in the American quilt — picturesque and just the right colors. But easy doesn’t make
it so. The purity and simplicity of the blues — its primitiveness — is myth. The blues, like an emotion, is complex. Blues is the singing to relieve woefulness, feeling good about
feeling bad. It’s a music born of pain, but it inspires pleasure, a vehicle that takes us from grief to relief. Muddy and his fans were aware of the conflict inherent in his later life, of
being enriched by the poor man’s music. He was a longtime success in Chicago when, in 1970, he was asked if he’d like to go back to Mississippi. His response was emphatic: “I
wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?” Yet in his music, every time he played he went back, every note recalled the poverty and suffering of
the Mississippi Delta. Musician after musician whom I interviewed talked about the way Muddy’s music changed so little; he stuck to the old, slow blues that he’d learned in Mississippi,
and which evoked the life and the land there. “That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records,” Muddy said, referring to his music. “You can hear it all the way
through.”

In 1958 the Mississippi bluesman was in London. He had already cut his career-defining hits; he was on the cusp of assuming his role as patriarch of rock and roll. After this trip, the Rolling
Stones, named
for one of his songs, would form; their first number-one hit in America would be a thematic reworking of Muddy’s first hit — his “I
Can’t Be Satisfied” would evolve into their “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

Muddy was over the shock of these Brits speaking English and sounding nothing like him. He was over the shock of them driving on the wrong side of the road. He was over the biggest shock of all
— that these people knew something about him, a farmer from the Mississippi Delta. He was sitting in a nice hotel room and speaking with a British journalist who had followed much of the
tour. They’d become friendly and the writer knew Muddy’s history, knew his music, had heard him play live. But there was one thing that really perplexed him, and that he knew perplexed
so many other blues fans and listeners. So how, this writer asked, how? How do you still have the blues?

The question snapped Muddy like a broken guitar string. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money, the foreign funny money mixed in with some real American bills, and he waved the
boodle over his head, around and around, showing it off as he answered. “There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to,” Muddy said. “When I play
in Chicago I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues — the blues we used to have when we had no money.”

Woe to the successful bluesman or blueswoman — or those who live to enjoy their success. He gets a little money in the bank, his authenticity is questioned. The fan demands, “Show me
the poverty.” And yet, sometimes looking at a scar brings back memories of the wound. Perhaps the great artists are not always those still wounded, but those who remember. “I been in
the blues all of my life,” Muddy said another time. “I’m still delivering ’cause I got a long memory.”

Muddy Waters, for whom there was so little paperwork for so much of his life, was born into a culture that white society did not believe worthy of documentation. Some papers exist, but the
panoply of racism, sexism, classism, and various other prejudices generally overshadowed the historical impulse. By the time the media began to document him extensively, his first career in music
was over (as was his
farming career), and he was enjoying renewed popularity with a new audience, a white audience. His relationship to whites had been formed in
Mississippi; he was a grown man — thirty years old — when he left. He’d been trained to “yassuh” and “nossuh” on demand, to tell the white man what he
believed the white man wanted to hear. (In addition to being an illiterate man from an oral culture, Muddy was generally quiet; one of his oft-expressed aphorisms was, “If you got something
you don’t want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.”) Lomax’s field trips, predating World War II, were encumbered with all the paternalism inherent in those times. In
some ways, that paternalism always exists. Cultures collide, and in that collision, nothing is unchanged. The explorer becomes a factor, the culture being viewed bears the taint of another’s
eyes. A different writer interviewing the same musicians, lovers, family members, and business associates of Muddy’s would likely have left each interview with different results.

Biography is the process of securing what is mutable. Undertaking the creation of one requires embracing the paradoxical: the writer is asked to create the skin and soul of a person, but not to
inhabit it. Standing inside Muddy’s crumbling Chicago home with his stepson, I listened for the man who occupied it, saw where ghosts thrive, felt a pulse of the past still beating. On my
most recent visit, the house had been stripped by rehabbers, the walls removed to the slats, the vestiges of the former occupant smashed, trashed, and hauled away. The renovation was being done for
Muddy’s great-granddaughter, who recently purchased the property. His spirit will live on in the stories she tells.

Muddy Waters shaped our culture: his song “Rollin’ Stone” inspired a band name and a magazine. When Bob Dylan went from acoustic folk music to rock and roll, he hired white
musicians who’d learned from Muddy in Chicago. Songs that Muddy wrote or made famous have become mainstream hits when performed by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and plenty of
others. These musicians find in Muddy’s songs — and convey to others — an honesty about pain. And that is something to which everyone can relate. Everybody hurts, sometime.

M
uddy Waters usually told people he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. That’s in Sharkey County, the lower quarter of the Mississippi
Delta. Rolling Fork was where the train stopped, where Muddy’s family would get their mail and do their shopping. Rolling Fork was on the map. But Muddy’s actual birthplace is to the
west and north of there, in the next county over — Issaquena, pronounced “Essaquena,” the initial “e” the only thing soft in this hard land.

Berta Grant, Muddy’s mother, lived next to the Cottonwood Plantation, at a bend in the road known as Jug’s Corner. It was a tiny settlement in the shadow of the Mississippi’s
levee, a cluster of shacks and cabins undistinguished from most others in the Mississippi Delta. Among locals, however, Jug’s Corner was well known: they had the fish fries on Saturday
nights.