My Vinyl Collection 186
Muddy Waters (4) Part 1, 1913-1950. The confluence of the Delta with the cities of the North. Music history from the shelves. 33 rpm, vinyl, sorted alphabetically.
1245. Muddy Waters, The Real Folk Blues, 1955-56 (1966) (1987)
1246. ——————-, Live in Antilles, 1974 (1988)
1247. ——————-, Hard Again (1977)
1248. ——————-, Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live (1979)
During the year 2000, moving from D.C. to Oregon, the wife and I decided to see where Highway 49 meets Highway 61. We knew this was the spot in Mississippi called the Crossroads where the Devil mythically taught Robert Johnson how to play guitar.
What we didn’t know was that 10 miles from the Crossroads was Stovall’s Farm. That’s the very place on this large-sized Earth where Muddy Waters grew into his music.Where he learned the riffs of Robert Johnson and Lonnie Johnson and many others.
McKinley Morganfield was 3-years-old in 1916 when his Granny moved the family to a cabin on Stovall. Mother was dead. The landscape in this part of Mississippi is bleak. Cotton. Flat. Bare most of the year. A lonely tractor. A tree aways off the road now and then. A cabin leaning sideways breathes its last. Abandoned, unpainted.
The remains of Muddy’s cabin have been cobbled together with some new nails, a strange restored structure where a man once lived, where tourists now flock, no longer at Stovall, rather the cabin rests its soul now inside the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, eight miles south.
With a little imagination you see a young field hand, age 28, sitting with a music scout on a porch. In 1941, the summer before Pearl Harbor. The sun makes the men squint as the scout, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, fiddles with the machine, sweaty. The young man is used to the heat. He’s curious, but he’s seen these machines before, these recorders. He’s curious more about this enthusiast from the East Coast.
Waters those days made a living as a sharecropper and tractor driver. He’d been performing in public since he was 13 and nobody had come to Stovall from the Library of Congress before. Lomax was in Clarksdale looking for Robert Johnson, but Johnson was three years dead and gone.
Two of the songs Lomax recorded arrived back down at Stovall on a 78 a while later, along with a $20 bill. Muddy was already making money with his music. But that was a turning point. That settled the stew. He’d be a full-time musician. For sure.
“Rollin’ Stone” “Mannish Boy” “Hootchie Cootchie Man” “Baby, Please Don’t Go” “I’m Ready” “Got My Mojo Workin’ I & II” “Forty Days and Forty Nights” “Feel Like Goin’ Home.”
In the post-war resurgence of American blues, Muddy Waters stands a step ahead of the large contingent of enthused and infused Delta players. Muddy became the best. Singer, songwriter, guitar slinger, a leader of bands that contained any number of cats who carved their own legends in Chicago blues. Muddy brought it. He definitely brought it. All of IT!
“Vitally charismatic” is an understatement by a flat mile. Unleashed on stage, charming on record, as each of the four well-sampled LPs from my collection demonstrate. But what’s really crazy is the way worked the crowds. Tough, tender, fierce, restrained, ecstatic. He and those influenced by him; those who influenced him; all made rural blues from the Deep South into the electric uptown style. Muddy brought this confluence of South with North to the world. The strands twisted so tightly on record and on stage they came to define the blues through the 1950s, ‘60s, and '70s.
So glad to have had you with us, Muddy.
It was also Granny Della Grant, who gave McKinley his a most unpresidential presidential nickname. Up on Stovall, he just loved to slap that Mississippi mud. That brown clay.
He discovered a neighbor had a Victrola and a stack of records. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red. Muddy got himself a used harmonica and commenced a-blowin’. By 13 he and guitarist Scott Bohanner, who also lived on Stovall, began to collect nickels and dimes at parties. The land in the Delta was seeped with the blues. Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton.
In 1933, Waters bought a guitar. He copied the bottleneck style. Heard at the house parties. Soon enough he had his own band and hosted his own house parties in his own shack.
The sharecroppers found energy there, vitality. The blues chased away the blues. The universe swung in even circles. The blues mocked the troubles, made a joke. Cracked a smile. Muddy got it. He laughed out loud. The crowd whooped a little, or just listened as Muddy rang out the blues solo or with the local string band, the Son Simms Four.
Before Lomax arrived Muddy Waters was a fixture on a Satt’y night around the vicinity of Clarksdale, sometimes joining Big Joe Williams or Robert Nighthawk. In 1940, he moved to St. Louis, the thriving industrial center up the river. He got a day job, but couldn’t edge his way into the music scene and soon retreated back south to Stovall. He went back to driving the tractor.
He hadn’t given up. But he was down. Then, out of the blue air the white man with the tape recorder arrived. After the ‘43 sessions Muddy headed north again. This time he skipped St. Louis for Chi-town where he landed work in paper plant by day. At night he struggled. But this time, he was more determined to stay, it might be his last chance. House parties and bars kept him going.
Then came the Big Break. Big, all right. At a house party. 1950. Here was Big Bill Bronzy, a established member of the Chicago scene. He gave Muddy crucial guitar tricks on the new instrument, the electric guitar. Plugged in and powerful, Muddy shot the roof off — exposing the room to a cutting slide. Vicious.
Soon enough, news of Big Bill’s discovery and those flying roof tops reached the brothers Chess, Leonard and Phil. The brothers Chess of Chess Recods, of course. In 1950, "Rollin' Stone" by the singer from Stovall, is noted on the Chess release list along with "My Foolish Heart" (Gene Ammons), and "That's All Right" (Jimmy Rogers), the first releases on the new label.
Next: Muddy Waters Part Two 1950-1983