Can't Be Satisfied (6 page)

Muddy’s introduction to the blues came early, in the dark seclusion of the rural countryside. “Our little house was way back in the country,” Muddy said. “We had one
house close to us, and hell the next one would’ve been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn’t nobody hear you. . . . The lady that lived across the field from us had a
phonograph when I was a little bitty boy. She used to let us go over there all the time, and I played it night and day.” These were the earliest “race” records, recordings made
after the Okeh label had taken a chance in 1921 and released Mamie Smith’s “The Crazy Blues”; it sold seventy-five thousand copies in a month and announced the presence of the
African American record-buying audience. Many existing popular-music companies formed subsidiary labels with their established names nowhere evident, afraid of the association with black music.

Muddy also listened to his preacher — to an extent. His childhood friend Myles Long, who himself became a preacher, remembered, “On Stovall, there’s a church and on up the road
to Farrell, there was another church. You look up the road, there’s another church on another plantation, and there’s another church on up the road. Churches in walking distance of the
houses.” The Fisk University sociologist Lewis Jones, who did fieldwork around Stovall, wrote in late 1941, “There are perhaps more churches than stores and schools combined.” In
the world of the field hand, the church was a dominant force.

Church folks did not appreciate blues. “My grandmother told me when I first picked that harmonica up,” said Muddy, “she said, ‘Son, you’re
sinning. You’re playing for the devil. Devil’s gonna get you.’ ” But in fact church spirituals and the rhythms of preaching were quickly incorporated into the blues, and
within decades were supplanted by this new style. By the middle of the twentieth century, the power of the church was losing influence to the power of the blues. The essential difference between
the blues and spirituals was summed up in 1943 by John Work, the pioneering black musicologist from Nashville: “The spirituals are choral and communal, the blues are solo and individual. The
spirituals are intensely religious, and the blues are just as intensely worldly. The spirituals sing of heaven, and of the fervent hope that after death the singer may enjoy the celestial views to
be found there. The blues singer has no interest in heaven, and not much hope in earth.” And yet without the church, there could have been no blues. Perhaps it goes back to what Muddy’s
cousin Elve said about plantation life: “But when you’ve been in the dark so long, you get used to it, you learn to see your way.” The blues and gospel music were two different
lanterns, but the path that they illuminated, if forking ahead, had a single origin.

Under the care of his grandmother, Muddy attended church every Sunday. Services were lively, and they built to an emotional frenzy. “You get a heck of a sound from the church,” said
Muddy. “Can’t you hear it in my voice?”

Soon people would.

I
n these communities without electricity, acoustic instruments, makeshift and manufactured, were a chief source of entertainment: a guitar,
harmonica, paper on a comb. The smaller instruments could be carried in a pocket, retrieved during a work break to help transport the soul to a kinder place. Initially, Muddy beat on a kerosene
can, then squeezed an old accordion around his grandmother’s house (“It was old, I sort of ramshacked it on out”), then fooled with the limited sounds of a Jew’s harp.
“All the kids made they own git-tars,” Muddy remembered. “Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn’t do much with it, but that’s how you
learn.”

It took Muddy six years to master the harmonica. “I was messing around with the harmonica ever since I got large enough to say, ‘Santy Claus, bring me a harp,’ ” said
Muddy. “But I was thirteen before I got a real good note out of it.” When he made too much racket in the house, his grandmother told him to take it outside, where he blew it some more,
picking up quick lessons from more accomplished players as well as a penny or two from a passing, sympathetic ear.

At Stovall, Della had purchased her own phonograph, powered by a hand crank. “My grandmother didn’t buy hardly anything but church songs,” Muddy said. “But I got hold of
some records with my little nickels, and borrowed some, listened to them very, very carefully. Texas Alexander and Barbecue Bob and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake — they was my thing
to listen to. And to get down to the heavy thing, you go into Son House, Charlie Patton. Roosevelt
Sykes been playing at ‘Forty-Four Blues’ on the piano, I thought
that’s the best I ever heard. And then here come Little Brother Montgomery with ‘Vicksburg Blues,’ and I say, ‘Goodgodamighty, these cats going wild.’ ”

He was “a kid,” he said, when he knew he wanted to be famous. “I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn’t play
ball too good — I hurt my finger and I stopped that. I couldn’t preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.”

It was Blind Lemon Jefferson who, in 1926, made record companies aware of the country blues market, the style of blues pervasive in the Mississippi Delta. Earlier in the decade, blues songs
usually featured female singers, such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, backed by jazzy, orchestra-influenced ensembles. Soon after Blind Lemon, Charlie Patton recorded, then Son House, Skip James,
Tommy McLennan, and many more. There were other types of music available, but Muddy had no interest. His emotions did not resonate to Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, or Arturo Toscanini. Paul Whiteman
was not in his universe, nor Fanny Brice, Maurice Chevalier. The Harry James Orchestra was not playing in any of the towns nearby. A little country or gospel sometimes on a stray radio, but when it
came to records and Muddy, it was basically all blues, Mississippi Delta blues.

“Every man would be hollering but you didn’t pay that no mind,” Muddy told author Paul Oliver. “Yeah, of course I’d holler too. You might call them blues but they
was just made-up things. Like a feller be working or most likely some gal be working near and you want to say something to ’em. So you holler it. Sing it. Or maybe to your mule or something,
or it’s getting late and you wanna go home. I was always singing just the way I felt, and maybe I didn’t exactly know it, but I just didn’t like the way things were down there
— in Mississippi.”

Myles Long, who took a job cooking and driving for Mrs. Stovall instead of moving up north, said of his friend, “In the fields, Muddy would always be humming something.” Muddy later
recalled, “When I was comin’ up, of course I had no ideas as to playin’ music
for a livin’. I just sing the blues ’cause I had to — it was
just somethin’ I had to do.”

“Muddy wasn’t a fellow that hung around people too much, but he had his associates in music,” said Elve Morganfield. Muddy palled around with a guy named Ed Moore, who could
thump on the guitar and liked to be with musicians. Buddy Bo Bolton liked to mess around at the fish fries and honky-tonks. And there was a tall guy, slightly older, named Scott Bohaner (often
misidentified as “Bow-handle”), who owned a guitar, was a bit heavyset, and favored overalls. “We learnt together,” Muddy said. “I was playin’ harp then. I used
to watch him makin’ chords and try to copy them. After I learned guitar, he just played second guitar, but he played lead when I was blowing harmonica.”

Before too long, Muddy went a bit more public with his passion. “Cotton farming, you don’t have too many ‘cabaret nights,’ ” Muddy said. “Saturday night is
your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for fifty cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down
blues.” At their first gig, Muddy and Bohaner were given a dollar and half a pint of moonshine between them; they each got their own fish sandwich.

Stovall had a baseball team and Muddy played second base, but there were other diamonds that glittered brighter. Merchants in Clarksdale, the Delta’s shipping center, would send trucks on
circuits through the country, picking up rural customers on Saturdays. So many blacks would fill the Clarksdale streets, cars couldn’t get through. Whites would sometimes park at the edge of
the activity and watch. A barber would set up his chair, the beautician would lay out her supplies. You could get your clothes pressed, your shoes shined. There were sharp suits and hats, there
were revellers and dandies. Musicians shacking up in the vicinity played in front of the furniture store, where furniture-sized phonographs were sold, as were the records to play on them.

Clarksdale had pool halls and beer joints for African Americans. Many of the clubs hired musicians, though the newfangled jukebox
was steadily taking many of those gigs.
But Clarksdale also had something that the country juke joints didn’t — a curfew. “Twelve o’clock you’d better be out of there,” said Muddy. “You had to
git off the streets. That great big police come down Sunflower with that big cap on, man, just waving that stick. You had to go in the country.” Bootleggers and others who ran juke joints
would come into town by afternoon and see who was drawing crowds. They’d hire the entertainer — and thereby his crowd — to bring it on down to the bootlegger’s place.

The country was wide open with gambling and music. This was a land where “juke joint” rhymed with “half-pint,” and where the heating liquid Sterno was consumed for kicks;
it was known as “canned heat” but pronounced “can-dy.” “They would have the parties just where they lived at,” said Muddy. “They would put the beds outside
and have the whole little room to do their little dancing in. They’d pull up a cotton house [a covered trailer used during harvest] and that’s their little gambling shed. And they made
lamps with coal oil. Take the plow line that they plows the mule with, stick it in a bottle, put a little wet on top and light it, had lamps hanging all around like that.”

“You’d find that house by the lights shining in the trees,” said bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, a contemporary of Muddy’s. “You’d get about a quarter mile from
that house and you hear the piano and the guitar thumping; you start to running then.”

“When you were playing in a place like that, you sit there on the floor in a cane-bottomed chair, just rear back and cut loose. There were no microphones or PA setups, you just loud as you
can,” said Johnny Shines, a bluesman who traveled with Robert Johnson. “The thing was to get the womens there to get the mens there so they’d gamble. And [the man throwing the
party], he’d cut the game, get his money that way. Sell whiskey too. . . . Beer was served in cups, whiskey you had to drink out of the bottle. They couldn’t use mugs in there because
the people would commit mayhem, tear people’s head up with those mugs. Rough places they were.”

“At that time,” Muddy said, “seem like everybody could play
some kind of instrument and there were so many fellers playing in the jukes ’round
Clarksdale I can’t remember them all. But the best we had to my ideas was Sonny House. He used to have a neck of a bottle over his little finger, touch the strings with that and make them
sing. That’s where I got the idea from.”

Muddy was fourteen years old when he first saw Son House perform. Son House was a powerful guitar player and a formidable presence. He could be as even as the rows he furrowed as a tractor
driver, or as fiery as the harsh white whiskey he liked to drink. Tall, angular, and bony, he had a deep, gravelly voice, coarse as a leveeman’s holler, that carried easily over a packed juke
house. A hammer of a man, a lanky, hard-hitting slide player, House favored a steel guitar, a Dobro-like instrument with a more metallic sound than the wooden guitar. His style was very percussive;
he struck the strings with vehemence. His upstroke was as powerful as his down and, in combination with the slide over his finger, he sounded like a lineman driving steel. Listening to Son House
was as bracing as a coldcock punch.

“I stone got crazy when I seen somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck,” Muddy said. “My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn. I used to
say to Son House, ‘Would you play so and so and so?’ because I was trying to get that touch on that thing he did.” Muddy was awed by this lanky wizard. He’d been previously
getting pointers from an older boy on Stovall named James Smith. “When I heard Son House, I should have broke my bottlenecks because this other cat hadn’t learned me nothing. Once, [Son
House] played a month in a row every Saturday night. I was there every night, close to him. You couldn’t get me out of that corner, listening to him. I watched that man’s fingers and
look like to me he was so good he was unlimited.”

Three years after seeing Son House for the first time, Muddy bought his first guitar. “I sold the last horse we had, made about fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother seven dollars
and fifty cents, I kept seven-fifty and paid about two-fifty for that guitar. It was a Stella, a second-handed one.” He purchased the instrument from a player in the area, Ed Moore.
“The first time I played on it
I made fifty cents at one of those all-night places, and then the man that run it raised me to two-fifty a night, and I knew I was doing
right.” When he’d socked away fourteen dollars in gig money, he ordered a guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. “I had a beautiful box then.”

The first guitar piece Muddy learned was Leroy Carr’s “How Long Blues.” Carr was a piano player; the guitar was just coming into its own as a lead instrument, and many
signature guitar riffs were transposed from the pounding piano. But Carr was unlike the barrelhouse players around Muddy. He played a smoother, more urban style, with a light edge to it. His
playing, often accompanied by guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, captured a carefree, lackadaisical feel. Before Carr died at the age of thirty in 1935, he had achieved substantial popularity through
his recordings. His style was antithetical to Son House’s, the two of them defining the range of influence on Muddy.