Can't Be Satisfied (5 page)

Eventually Della Grant moved with her son and grandson eighty miles north to Stovall, in Coahoma County, a six-mile walk northwest of Clarksdale. Exactly when Della moved to Stovall is not known
(probably when Muddy was between the ages of six months and three years), but by March 6, 1920, she was there to answer the census taker’s questions. A large plantation — four thousand
acres — with a kindly reputation, Stovall was home to Della’s cousins, the Dan “Duke” Jones family; Ollie Morganfield’s two brothers were also there. After Muddy
moved, Ollie did not pursue contact, devoting himself to his next wife and their ten children. “I never did see my dad when I was living [on Stovall],” said Muddy. “I didn’t
see him at all.”

Tenant homes throughout the Delta followed a standard boxy design. And plantation owners treated the dwellings like the dwellers: as a group, units for a prosperous whole. They painted them all
at once, and all one color — usually green or brown, trimmed in white. Most were two big rooms. Della’s cabin (Route 1, Box 84) had begun as a single room built from hand-hewn cypress
planks by a hunter before the Civil War. By the time she occupied it, a kitchen and two more small rooms had been added. Tenant houses had neither running water nor electricity. Mattresses were
ticks — fabric stuffed with cotton bolls and cotton shuck that had to be fluffed before sleeping and smoothed after waking. Water was hand pumped, and pumps had to be primed, which took an
eternity on cold mornings; light came from kerosene (“coal oil”) lamps. Women sometimes mopped the wooden floors with lye and hot water to make them white. At Christmas or other
occasions, they’d get newspaper from a trash can in Clarksdale, make a paste with flour, and plaster the
walls, which both brightened and insulated the rooms. (Bits of
newspaper are still evident on the walls of Muddy’s cabin.)

People grew what they ate, buying flour and sugar, and the Stovalls made sure the vegetable gardens were prepared before the cotton, so there would always be food. Fruits and vegetables, grown
in gardens behind or beside the house, were preserved in jars for the winter. There was no refrigeration, no freezers. When there was ice, it was put in croker sacks (the burlap shipping bags for
grain and corn), then insulated with sawdust to make it last. Sharecroppers had to be practical and efficient; even waste was not wasted, with the animal dung used as fertilizer. Bootlegging,
gambling, and parties were protected, even encouraged, by Colonel Howard Stovall III, the boss man. “Mr. Stovall wouldn’t let his folks go hungry,” said longtime resident Manuel
Jackson. “If you didn’t have enough money, he’d let you get it from the store. ‘Tell ’em not just half either,’ he’d say, ‘all of it. Now get what
you want.’ He was fine like that. He’d been in the service and he cussed all the time. You’d hear him cussing and think he was going to eat you up, but he wasn’t fighting
nobody.”

According to Stovall’s current farm manager, Pete Hunter, “Stovall supplied the sharecropper his house, his food, lard, medical care, many times hogs and chickens, milk cows. Stovall
had a dairy. It was not unusual, around Christmas, to furnish people with hogs and beef. The furnish also included their plows and harnesses, their mules, the fertilizer, their seed, and
insecticide — which was powdered arsenic put in croker sacks on the backs of mules, and a guy would ride that mule down the rows beating the sack with a stick, breathing arsenic all day long.
You probably can dig him up and he’ll look like he did the day he died. All that was furnished and charged.” Overall, Stovall was a relatively friendly place, though the region was much
less so. One of Muddy’s girlfriends had a friend from Stovall who was promptly lynched after he allegedly flirted with a white woman. (Often this was the trumped-up charge for a lynching,
when the real reason may have been “attitude,” prosperousness, or a form of manhood interpreted as a threat to white womanhood.)

Stovall was bustling with kids. Children were an asset to share-croppers;
more hands picking more cotton meant more pay. Duke Jones had a son, Dan Jr., who was five years
older than Muddy. Eddie Boyd, who would become a recording artist in Chicago, lived up the road and visited often; his cousin married Muddy’s uncle. Joe Willie Wilkins, who would gain repute
as a guitarist, was often around. And Andrew Bolton, known always as “Bo,” who was like a brother to Muddy throughout their lives, was from Stovall. He followed Muddy to Chicago and
worked for him as a driver and bodyguard. Even as a child he was physically threatening; lifelong, his running joke was intimidating people.

Life was slow: two mules to a wagon, four mules to a plow. That slow and steady turning of the wheels set the rhythm for the music, the pace for the life. Kids on the farm didn’t have much
but each other to play with. A barrel hoop and a stick, a piece of a bicycle; on Christmas they’d have firecrackers. Muddy’s cousin remembers when his family got a radio. “There
was just so much you could get on it.” Most of that was country-inflected white music; the Grand Ole Opry was popular among all cultures.

Life was fast: sexual explorations began at a young age. Teenage pregnancies were common. A generation was often less than twenty years. Treatable diseases regularly received no attention, and
many children died preventable deaths.

A day on Stovall began early. Colonel Stovall’s daughter Marie Stovall Webster remembered, “They used to ring the bell at four o’clock in the morning to wake all the hands on
the place.” The lifetime of labor began before the age of reason, five or six years old. Children too small to hold a cotton sack were sent to the fields with a cart, a keg of water, and a
dipper. “Waterboy!” was the holler they answered to, slaking the picker’s thirst. “There were some things we couldn’t do because we weren’t old enough,”
said the Reverend Willie Morganfield, the seventh son of Muddy’s uncle Lewis. “But as we grew, we learned to do whatever had to be done.”

“I started early on, burning corn stumps, carrying water to the people that was working.” Muddy laughed. “Oh I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about
eight years old. Give
me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. Really that never was my speed, I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother,
didn’t want to get away from around her too far. Them older people like my grandmother, they didn’t think you could make it in no kind of city. They think if you get in the city —
starvation. But they were living in starvation on the plantation.”

Education was a consideration far enough behind work that many things could get in the way of it. While white children enjoyed a standard nine-month term, blacks began school after the cotton
had been picked, around Christmas. Black schools were usually one room — often the church — and convened only during the coldest months. Because the spring planting was less
labor-intensive than the fall harvest and could be handled by the men, the young girls were afforded an extra month of education.

“I went to school,” said Muddy, who quit after his third year, “but they didn’t give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working
in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age, but I was just a boy and they put me to working right alongside the men. I handled the plow, chopped cotton, did all of them things.” In the
course of his life, though he could articulate complex emotions, Muddy learned only how to sound out words on a page, but could not simultaneously comprehend them.

“We’d get up early in the morning, we’d work all day, and the only sound I recall from nights were crickets hollering,” said the Reverend Willie Morganfield. “You
really didn’t get much of a chance to hear anything because when you’d go to sleep, you’d just sleep.”

“It was really dark out there,” said Muddy’s cousin Elve Morganfield. “But when you’ve been in the dark so long, you get used to it, you learn to see your
way.”

Had Muddy been born half a century earlier into slavery, or half a century later, his living conditions would not have been much different. The Delta land itself rebels against
change; when the seasons move from cold to warm, tornados wreak havoc, one wind battling
for change, the other for the status quo. But the music would have been different.
Muddy Waters was raised on a musical cusp, coming of age at the time the blues was crystalizing as a genre. The catalyst was the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, when a large
population of blacks were unmoored, searching for their place in a society which had previously defined them as chattel. Like a kiln, this integration fired the mix of Anglo-Scottish ballad
traditions and jigs (which had cascaded down the mountains and into the Delta like water into a basin) with the existing dominant form in black music — string bands, led by violins and
banjos, with mandolins and guitars playing two-chord breakdowns. The blues, born of the frustration of freedom, began taking shape.

Blues came from hardship and became nothing less than a tool for survival. Like gospel music, blues offered release, relief. It commands the present moment, demanding that you forget the toil of
your past, forget the woes ahead, that you get into this song and this feeling right now and give yourself over entirely to it. Though the blues draws from a large pool of preexisting lyrics,
couplets, game songs, and sayings, it is a deeply personal sort of music. Its generic lines always combine with the singer’s own thoughts and expressions. (In “I Feel Like Going
Home,” Muddy follows “Brooks run into the ocean / the ocean runs into the sea” with “If I don’t find my baby, somebody’s sure going to bury me.”) Over the
years, the form has become somewhat standardized, with many blues fitting a twelve-bar pattern and taking the lyrical shape of AAB — the first line (often a generic truth) repeated twice, and
then resolved in the more intimate third. But many of the masters disregard convention and create their blues in the way that suits them best. At that moment. At that time. Do it again? It’ll
be different. Songs are
feel
over
form,
eleven bars or thirteen or thirty bars. The singer changes chords when he’s ready and not according to formalistic demands. If
he’s getting down with one particular verse and wants to drag it on, he does. This is especially easy when performing solo, but any accomplished blues accompanist knows to change when the
leader changes and not to count measures. Muddy called himself a “delay singer” because people — the audience
and the band — “have to hang around
and wait and see what’s going to happen next.”

One of the earliest descriptions of blues comes from a 1903 article in
the Journal of American Folklore,
written by Charles Peabody, an archaeologist who was excavating Indian mounds
near Stovall. He noted “the distichs and improvisations in rhythm more or less phrased sung to an intoning more or less approaching melody. These ditties and distichs were either of a general
application referring to manners, customs, and events of Negro life or of special appositeness improvised on the spur of the moment on a topic then interesting.” He cites several refrains
that remain common in blues songs a century later (“They had me arrested for murder / And I never harmed a man” and “Some folks say a preacher won’t steal / But I found two
in my cornfield”). Peabody even found himself — his idleness — a subject of their work songs (“I’m so tired I’m most dead / [He’s] sittin’ up there
playing mumblely-peg”).

Also in 1903, W. C. Handy, who would be the first to write sheet music for the blues, had been playing waltzes and other formal styles with his Knights of Pythias Band and Orchestra when he
heard a guitarist sliding the neck of a bottle along his strings at a Delta train station. The sound, he wrote in his autobiography, was “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” That same
year, in Cleveland, Mississippi, he encountered his first blues band, a trio featuring “a battered guitar, a mandolin, and a worn-out bass.” Handy described the trio’s music as
“disturbing . . . agonizing . . . haunting,” and continued, “I commenced to wonder if anybody besides small-town rounders and their running mates would go for it. The answer was
not long in coming. A rain of silver dollars began to fall. . . . There before the boys lay more money than my nine musicians were being paid for the entire engagement. Then I saw the beauty of
primitive music.”

The introduction of the bottleneck style was essential in moving the guitar from the rhythm section of a group to the fore. Sliding a bottleneck across the strings produces a metallic, keening
sound that was refined to high art in the Mississippi Delta. The bottleneck — sometimes a butter knife or penknife — could be applied to one or
several of the
strings, creating a whining sound that complemented the natural ambiguities of the human voice. The slide could also be pounded like a smooth fist along the guitar’s neck to add impact and
intent to the singer’s plaint. When coaxed by an accomplished player, the slide guitar became an extension of the voice, a responsive chorus, an animate entity, called forth and evoked like a
spirit, with a character of its own. It also created volume enough to be heard over the din of a raucous good time. The hand’s movement when playing slide is like a beckoning, taking in the
listener: “C’mon with me, don’t you want to go? I’m going up the country, where the water tastes like cherry wine.”