Can't Be Satisfied (51 page)

16
“Our little house was way back in the country”: Palmer,
Deep Blues,
p. 100.

16
“On Stovall, there’s a church and on up the road to Farrell”: Lasker interview with Myles
Long.

16
“more churches than stores and schools combined”: Jones, “Folk Culture Study,” p. 4.

16
“My grandmother told me when I first picked that harmonica up”: Rooney,
Bossmen,
p. 105; also New York Radio
interview, 1966.

17
the church was losing influence: Samuel Adams Jr., a sociologist who lived in Coahoma County in 1941, wrote

17
“The spirituals are choral”: Work,
Negro Songs,
p. 28.

17
“You get a heck of a sound”: Welding, “An Interview.”

17
“Can’t you hear it in my voice”: Palmer,
Deep Blues.

2: M
AN
, I C
AN
S
ING
1926–1940

Muddy’s First Guitar and Influences:
Muddy told many stories about acquiring his first guitar, including the tale that his grandmother sold a cow and shared the money with
him; he told James Rooney, “I saved nickels and dimes until I got two dollars and fifty cents, and I bought it from a young man named Ed Moore.” (Rooney,
Bossmen,
p. 105.)

In addition to learning from Scott Bohaner, Muddy mentions “this other cat,” referring to James Smith, a local player. Muddy told Guralnick in 1970, “Several boys around there
could use the slide and I’d say they were just as good as Robert
Johnson, the only thing about it is they never had a chance to get a record out.” (The same
applies today. Give a listen to the field recordings on the recent collection from Music Maker Records
Expressin’ the Blues,
which documents contemporary unrecognized blues talent.)
Muddy remained friends with Bohaner, who had a child, Esther Morganfield, with Muddy’s cousin Lois. Jim O’Neal verified the spelling “Bohaner” in the Social Security Index,
though Robert Pruter found it as “Bohanner” in Chicago telephone directories. Scott’s description in the text comes from Richard “Harmonica Slim” Riggins. Elve
Morganfield remembered Bohaner from Stovall: “Scott was a brown-skin fella, nice head of hair, wore a mustache. Always kept a smile on his face.”

When Muddy was buying 78s, record stores per se didn’t exist in rural areas like the Mississippi Delta. Phonographs were large instruments, standing tall and made of heavy wood, occupying
a significant place in a room. Hence, they were sold primarily in furniture stores; as a result, records were also sold there. In smaller towns, furniture was sold in a general store.
“Really, in the little town I was around they didn’t have just a definite record store,” Muddy told
Living Blues.
(O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy
Waters.”) “They’d sell everything like shotgun shells, and pistols and cartridges, something like a hardware store.” One interesting consequence was that many furniture
retailers became early talent scouts. H. C. Speir, in Jackson, Mississippi, was perhaps the most famous. He ran auditions, where he “discovered” Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son
House, Skip James, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Tommy Johnson, among others. He claimed to have become a talent scout only so his store would have good records to sell. Another retail scout was
Lillian McMurray, who ran the Trumpet label out of her Jackson, Mississippi, furniture store in the early 1950s. She was the first to record Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller), and she also
recorded Joe Willie Wilkins, Elmore James, and Willie Love.

Charlie Patton:
Despite the occasional issuing of his records with “Charley” instead of “Charlie,” Patton, who could not read or write, could sign his
name, and did so with an “l-i-e.” A brief list of Patton’s students is something like a “who’s who” of early blues: Son House, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown,
Howlin’ Wolf. The list of those he influenced — from Robert Johnson to Houston Stackhouse, from Tommy McLennan to Muddy — would fill a book. Revenant Records has released a
fascinating and beautiful box set of Patton’s recordings and those influenced by him,
Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.
In Revenant’s
fine fashion, it includes an extensive hardcover book; one entire CD is devoted to interviews with those who knew Patton. Other sources for Charlie Patton include
King of the Delta Blues: The
Life and Music of Charlie Patton
by Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, and the collaborative
The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions.

Country Boy, City Lights:
Honeyboy Edwards told me that Muddy lived for some time in Mayersville, on the river near Rolling Fork. It’s possible that was in 1930; although
I found other early census reports on Muddy, I could not locate him in that year. I tried Stovall and Blytheville, Arkansas, where Muddy told Lomax his family lived for a while. Edwards claimed,
“Muddy stayed out there, my uncle lived out there, too. That’s why I know that. Then he moved up about ten or twelve
miles further, out from Rolling Fork. If they
stayed here and didn’t make any money this year, then they say I’m going back over here.” Mayersville, the county seat, is also a jail.

Reverend Morganfield remembered covering for Muddy when his playing took him far from Stovall. “He’d be gone, playing the guitar. Sharecropper, they’d leave it up to you to
make sure you got the work done. Muddy had two small mules, and we would plow and take care of things for him when he had something else to do.” Muddy’s early ventures to Memphis
remained indelibly etched in his mind, especially Handy Park on Beale Street. “They had some people in that park that was running rings around us,” he told McKee and Chisenhall.
“Them people in Memphis was baaaad, man. Big Shaky Head Walter was the harp man.” A 1941 interview quoted a resident of the Stovall-neighboring King–Anderson Plantation: “I
likes Memphis this way: there ain’t as much prejudice. You don’t have to merry bow as low there to the white man as you do in Mississippi.” (Adams, Manuscript, Lomax
Archives.)

When Honeyboy Edwards first met him, Muddy was working his traps. “Joe Williams took me to meet Muddy Waters in 1939,” Edwards told me. “Joe knew everybody! Muddy was staying
out in the country at the time. He was a trapper. He would catch coons and possums, minks. We went to his house and his wife was there. [I think this would have been Leola.] She said, ‘Muddy,
he’s in the woods pickin’ up his traps.’ We waited for him and he come back, wearing those hip boots. He had a gang of possums and threw them in the corner. His wife fixed supper
for us. He had a lot of game, gravy, biscuits. Some people come buy half a pint from him, wasn’t but about fifty cents. I don’t know whether he was making it, but he had plenty of
whiskey in his house. Muddy hustled all kinds of ways out there.”

Muddy sold whiskey but probably did not run his own still. “Brownie Emerson,” he told Margaret McKee, “he was making good whiskey. John McKee at [the neighboring] McKee
Plantation, I used to buy whiskey off of John McKee. It costs two dollars and fifty cents a gallon. I used to sell it off for twenty-five cents a half-pint. You had sixteen half-pints.” The
other popular drink, even cheaper, was Sterno, or “canned heat.” One side effect of canned heat was the jake leg, a paralysis of the limbs. Mager Johnson, brother of bluesman Tommy
Johnson, remembered his brother’s frequent use: “That canned heat, it was red. It was in those little old cans. When you open it, take the top off the can. He’d strike him a match
and burn it, burn the top of it. And he’d put it in a rag and strain it. It’s got juice in it. Squeeze the juice out of it into a glass. And then get him some sugar and put it in there.
And then some water. And there he’d go. Oh, he started I don’t know how many people around here in Copiah drinking that stuff.” (Evans,
Big Road Blues,
p. 57; this book
is an excellent source for more information on Tommy Johnson.)

19
“ramshacked it on out”: Rooney,
Bossmen,
p. 104.

19
“All the kids made they own git-tars”: Oliver,
Conversation.

19
“I was messing around with the harmonica”: Welding, “An Interview.”

19
“But I got hold of some records with my little nickels”: Ibid.

19
“Texas Alexander and Barbecue Bob”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

20
“I wanted to definitely be a musician”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”

20
“Yeah, of course I’d holler too”: Oliver,
Conversation,
p. 30.

20
“Muddy would always be humming”: Lasker interview with Myles Long.

20
“When I was comin’ up”: Oliver,
Conversation.

21
“I was playin’ harp then”: Welding, “An Interview.”

21
“cabaret nights”: Welding, “Afro Mud.”

21
“Everybody used to fry up fish”: Welding, “An Interview”; O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy
Waters.”

22
“Twelve o’clock you’d better be out of there”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

22
“They would have the parties”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

22
“You’d find that house by the lights shining in the trees”: Edwards,
The World,
p. 51.

22
“When you were playing in a place like that”: Welding, Interview with Johnny Shines, p. 24.

22
“seem like everybody could play some kind of instrument”: Oliver,
Conversation.

23
“I stone got crazy”: Gibbs, “The Entertainers: Muddy Waters,” p. 23.

23
“I used to say to Son House”: DeMichael, “Father and Son,” p. 12.

23
“I should have broke my bottlenecks”: Ibid.

23
“I sold the last horse we had”: Palmer,
Deep Blues,
p. 101.

23
“The first time I played on it”: Aldin, Liner notes to
The Complete Plantation Recordings.

24
“I saw Patton in my younger life days”: Murray,
Shots,
p. 179.

24
“I worked for fifty cents a day” McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

25
“We made the whiskey in canal ditches”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 234; McKee and Chisenhall interview with
Muddy Waters.

25
“I’d have my own Saturday-night dances”: Palmer, “The Delta Sun.”

26
“how that music carries”: Palmer,
Deep Blues.

26
“wild and crazy and dumb in my car”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

26
“I didn’t ramble that far”: Palmer,
Deep Blues.

In his song “Burr Clover Blues,” Muddy sang of a town fifteen miles away as “way up in Dundee.” He never set foot in Helena — a swinging town twenty miles from his
home — until KFFA began broadcasting blues from there.

26
“I knew Robert Nighthawk”: O’Neal and van Singel interview with Muddy Waters.

27
“I played with Big Joe Williams”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.

27
“pal around with him”: Ibid.

27
“Big Joe made Muddy quit coming around with him”: “Blewett Thomas Interview,”
Blues Access.

27
Asian descent: The possibility of Muddy being partially of Asian descent is not wholly unlikely. A Chinese population had been in the
Delta since 1879, brought in to build the railroad lines.

28
“Every girl I met mistreated me”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

28
“Robert Nighthawk played at my first wedding”: O’Neal and van Singel interview with Muddy Waters.