Can't Be Satisfied (54 page)
Read Can't Be Satisfied Online
Authors: Robert Gordon
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“small change”: Ibid, p. 12.
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“My favorite men”: Ibid.
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“I could feel [racism]”: Melish, “The Man.”
In an excellent
Living Blues
cover story about Jimmy Rogers in 1997, “I’m Havin’ Fun Right Today,” author John Brisbin mishears Rogers say
that a “state senator” brought Muddy to his house. “There wasn’t no senator that drove him over there,” Rogers told me. “He came over there with somebody
that Jesse knew.”
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“started jamming over at his house”: Rowe,
Chicago Blues,
p. 67.
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“I knew what I was listening for”: Melish, “The Man.”
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“I just harmonize it”: Author interview with Jimmy Rogers.
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“nobody home but us musicians”: Ibid.
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“start this house-party deal”: Rowe,
Chicago Blues,
p. 67.
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“One night it was raining”: O’Neal, “Blue Smitty” part 1.
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“I went down in Jewtown”: Ibid.
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“He really learnt me some things”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
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“It was a very, very good improvement”: Wheeler, “Waters–Winter Interview.”
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“I was playing with Smitty”: Voce, “Jimmy Rogers.”
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“If Blue Smitty wasn’t there”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun.”
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“We’d call it scabbing”: Rowe,
Chicago Blues,
p. 49.
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“So one day I was going to get a haircut”: O’Neal, “Blue Smitty” part 2.
Muddy told Pete Welding the tavern was at Polk and Ogden Streets on the West Side.
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“We were playing our little clubs”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
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“My uncle Joe [Grant]”: Oliver,
Conversation.
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“It wasn’t no name-brand”: Murray,
Shots,
p. 182.
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“It was a very different sound”: Obrecht, “Bluesman.”
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“He wanted me to play like Johnny Moore”: Welding, “An Interview.”
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“He got his paycheck”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun,” p. 21.
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“Musicians, blues players”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”
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“He had that particular little twinkle”: Obrecht, “Bluesman.”
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“Why don’t you sing one”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
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“I remember that session”: O’Neal, “Muddy’s First.”
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“When we discovered what was going down, then I said, ‘Wow, man! We got something here!’ ”: N.p., n.d.
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“That country stuff might sound funny to ’em”: Obrecht, “Life and Times.”
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vaulted for almost a quarter century: Muddy’s Lester Melrose tracks were first released in 1972, on Pete Welding’s
Testament LP,
Chicago Blues: The Beginning.
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“You gotta have something”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
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“People interested in people selling”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
6: R
OLLIN’ AND
T
UMBLIN’
1947–1950
More on the Band’s Formative Years:
Honeyboy Edwards gives a great account of Walter’s arrival in Chicago, after falling in with him in St. Louis: “We had
heard about Maxwell Street. That was where the happening was. Musicians come to Chicago from everywhere just to play on Maxwell Street. They could make a living there. [Walter and I] hitchhiked
from East St. Louis to Decatur, Illinois. So we hit the streets in Decatur, and found a little whiskey house and played a while there. Then we played at that train station, Walter playing that harp
loud. I had my guitar and little amplifier. And we made enough at that station to buy tickets to ride to Chicago. We rode the cushions!” (Edwards,
The World,
p. 150.) When Jimmy went
outside to hear Walter, a rainstorm sent them scurrying to Jimmy’s nearby apartment. Walter went home wearing Jimmy’s dry clothes. “He’d come to my house every day,”
Rogers said, “wake me up. We’d talk and sit down and rehearse.” (Melish, “The Man.”)
Though no one else was home when Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter began rehearsing at Muddy’s, they “wouldn’t never blast the volume,” Jimmy told me. “The distortion would
get in the way. You keep it down where each individual can just about hear where the next one’s going.” He told Jas Obrecht that music “was the most serious thing that I had going
in my life. Every day we would do that. We’d meet over at Muddy’s house. I could walk from my house to Muddy’s in about ten minutes. It was a long ways to walk, but it
wasn’t worth paying a streetcar fare to ride down there.” (Obrecht interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Jimmy Rogers lived at Twelfth and Peoria, twelve blocks from Thirteenth and Ashland.
There are many variations on the story of Muddy getting to his first session. One excuse Muddy remembered giving to his superiors was that his cousin had been found dead in an alley. Also, some
versions have Muddy stopping at home and learning of the session, and turning over the truck and the rest of the deliveries to his childhood friend Andrew “Bo” Bolton (Bo is the
mysterious “Antra Bolton” mentioned in Rowe’s
Chicago Blues
). It probably was not Geneva with whom Sunnyland conspired because it’s unlikely Muddy had met her yet.
(In the 1955
Chicago Defender
he stated he was already successfully recording when they met. [Alfred
Duckett and Muddy Waters, “We Got a Right to Sing the
Blues,”
Chicago Defender,
March 26, 1955.]) The versions that have Muddy driving his uncle’s coal truck or driving a junk truck for Chess seem to be plain
misunderstandings.
John Brisbin, who specializes in extended articles written in his interviewee’s own words (a genre requiring persistence and patience), got the following from Sunnyland Slim, who was
notorious for confusing stories:
A visitor found patience rewarded when, out of Sunnyland’s whispery mists, came a clear, comprehensible version of that story, told as if it happened yesterday:
“Leonard Chess and Phil Chess, they wanted me to make this record. They wanted me to bring one of them old soul guitar players. I tried to get ’em one, get ’em Lee Cooper or
Johnny Shines. Couldn’t do it. My wife said, ‘What the hell. Why don’t you go and get somebody to make the record ’cause the man done left the paper there.’ It was
eighty-two dollars, union. . . . So I went and paid nine cents streetcar fare. Bessie didn’t have but fifty-four cents to give me. I went over to Eighteenth Street and met Bo,
Muddy’s cousin. And I never will forget. We went on back to Canal Street. Muddy wasn’t there see, but we talked to his boss. We told a lie. I said my daddy was fixin’ to die,
Muddy’s mother was a little sick. We just conned the boss so we could get Muddy off the next day. . . . The man went for it. I played for a show that night. Big Crawford, Muddy, and I. It
sounded so good. Muddy sounded good, good! We went to the studio the next day and Leonard Chess asked me, ‘Hey man, can your partner sing?’ I said, ‘Sure, man. Set it
up!’ You know, to help Muddy out. But, you see, the thing were we had to square up things ’cause Muddy wasn’t in the union. We had to go through some changes, you know, to get
him in.” (Brisbin, “Sunnyland Slim,” p. 54)
Blue Smitty, however, remembered being taken to the union, with Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, by Eddie Boyd in the mid-1940s.
Jimmy Rogers remembered Big Crawford fondly. “He was the nicest guy. He was a big and tall guy — weighed about three hundred-and-some pounds and stood about six feet five inches. He
was a huge guy, like Willie Dixon. I’d see him all the time, and we would talk and crack jokes and fool around together.” (Obrecht interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Rogers also recalled
Muddy’s reluctance to record without the band. Though solo country blues were popular — Lightnin’ Hopkins had sold well with his spare “Katie May,” Big Joe Williams
was attracting attention, and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” was in the wind — Muddy “didn’t want to play by himself. Sunnyland kept urging him. At that
time, his bills was kind of gettin’ high, his car note and he had to pay his rent. Muddy was kind of a tight guy with them pennies, man. So he tried it.” (Brisbin, “Havin’
Fun,” p. 23.)
Though Muddy and Jimmy continued to play in clubs together every week, two more years would pass before they would record together for Leonard. Jimmy, in conversation in his later years, spoke
disparagingly of Leonard. (“Leonard was pretty slick,” he told me. “Those guys was gypping you as far as your money or taking your material.”) Jimmy signed to Apollo Records
in New York in 1949, before finally acceding to Chess’s dominance in Chicago. (“[Chess] was too heavy. You couldn’t get no place unless you come through him.” [O’Neal
and Greensmith,
“Jimmy Rogers.”]) For Baby Face Leroy, stardom never came — he liked music only when it was exciting. Though he would later record for the
small Chicago label J.O.B., he mostly got out of music. By the decade’s end, he was dead from tuberculosis.
Early Success:
“My earliest memory of Muddy is when we were living on the West Side,” said Charles “Bang Bang” Williams, Muddy’s stepson and
Geneva’s second child, who was seven when his mother moved in with Muddy. “I came home from school, and he was listening to one of his records with a fella that lived across the
street.” Geneva moved to Muddy’s with Charles; her other son Dennis soon came up from Mississippi, and Bo found his own place. Charles rode with Muddy on deliveries and remembers him
preparing for gigs. “Muddy would slick his hair back, have bangs, the way black people used to wear their hair, tuxedo grease. But he wouldn’t miss no days from work. I don’t
think he stopped working on the venetian blinds truck until the early 1950s.”
Billy Boy Arnold, then an aspiring harmonica player selling newspapers in front of the South Side’s Persian Hotel (and later an accompanist to Bo Diddley and Fats Domino), remembered the
heat around Muddy’s 1949 hit “Screamin’ and Cryin’.” “The Persian Ballroom was in there, and I saw all kinds of people there, Joe Louis, T-Bone Walker, I saw
Ella Fitzgerald in the beauty shop getting her nails done. People were talking about ‘Screamin’ and Cryin’.’ Muddy was hot then. I spoke to him when he was getting out of
the car. He had a pretty black convertible, nineteen forty-eight Buick. It was a sleek new car and I walked from his car to the Persian Hotel with him. I’d ask every man with a guitar did
they know Sonny Boy. He said, ‘Yeah, Sonny Boy was my partner.’ I told him I played harmonica. He said, ‘Oh, that’s good, keep it up.’ ” Muddy told Billy Boy he
was going in to talk to his manager; I’ve tried hard to positively identify who that might have been, and can only conjecture that it was Big Bill Hill, the disc jockey who also had an
agency.
Muddy’s Stint in Helena:
“We was just going down to be doing something,” Muddy told
Living Blues.
“We wasn’t going to stay down there, no
way.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) Locals told me the band played Helena’s Owl Cafe, the Cotton Club in Forrest City, the opening of the New Roxy movie
theater in Clarksdale, a schoolhouse in Coahoma County where dances were held, and Will McComb’s café on the same road as Muddy’s old Stovall home.
Muddy’s longtime Chicago gig at the Zanzibar had a heavy impact on the future of blues. One youngster who lived behind the club was future blues star Freddy King. He would slip in the side
door, too young to be in there, to watch the band. “He was big and husky,” Jimmy Rogers told
Living Blues
(O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers”), “but
was nothing but a boy. He’d sit right at the bar, next to me, watch every move I’d make on the guitar.” King later made Jimmy’s “That’s All Right” and
“Walkin’ by Myself” part of his regular set. Otis Rush also had his blues epiphany at the Zanzibar. He was fourteen and visiting his sister in Chicago in 1948; she took him to see
Muddy, and he decided, “This is what I want to do.”
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“I heard this harmonica one Sunday”: Melish, “The Man.”
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“It was amazing”: Voce, “Jimmy Rogers.”
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“He had a bass player”: Melish, “The Man.”
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“Walter was wild”: Brisbin interview with Jimmy Rogers.
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“What really made me choose [harmonica]”: Wilmer,
Jazz Beat,
pp. 14–15.
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“playing around a few shoeshine stands”: Guralnick,
Home,
p. 73.
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“I told Muddy I met a boy”: Voce, “Jimmy Rogers.”
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“Muddy and I could hear”: Melish, “The Man.”
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“When I met him he wasn’t drinking”: Guralnick,
Home,
p. 75.
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“He didn’t have very good time”: Murray,
Shots,
pp. 184–185.
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“He’d get executing and go on”: Brisbin, “Havin’ Fun,” p. 22; author interview with Jimmy
Rogers.
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“There were four of us”: Obrecht, “Bluesman,” p. 54.
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“patrol buy”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.
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R. L. Burnside: Annie Mae Burnside had come up from Marks, Mississippi. “When I got to Chicago in nineteen forty-six, my dad was
up there, staying on Fourteenth Street, and he told me, ‘Muddy live right over there.’ ”