Muddy Waters: 1915–1983
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MUDDY WATERS WAS A POWER IN THE world of rock, as the list of his disciples and devotees attests, but he was much more than that. He was a great American singer. Muddy’s timing, his phrasing, his razorsharp intonation and command of the subtlest shadings of pitch, and his vocabulary of vocal effects – –from the purest falsetto to the grittiest roar –– put him in a class by himself.
The close-up shots of Muddy during his spellbinding performance of “Mannish Boy” in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz show how hard he worked. He would open and contract his throat, wrinkle his jowls and then give them a good healthy shake, just out his jaw or pull it back in, knowing exactly what each precisely calibrated movement would do to the sound he produced. He was without peer when it came to communicating the minutest gradations of feeling –– the difference, say, between being sad with no hope and being sad but determined to carry on. And then he’d turn around and put his heart and soul into a pure, uncomplicated shout of mannish pride, declaring himself a ma-a-an, a natural-born lover man, a rollin’ stone.
Muddy Waters would be remembered as a vocal artist of astonishing depth and power if he had never touched a guitar. But with the neck of a whiskey bottle or, later, a length of metal tubing on his finger, he was able to make his guitar sing, too. A close listen to one of his dramatic slide-guitar solos– –on the Chess hit “Honey Bee,” for example –– reveals an extraordinary precision and emotional richness. He gave each note a specific weight, bending or flattening it as the emotional import and melodic contour of the musical situation required.
For Muddy Waters, the blues were a specific art, an art of emotional and musical exactitude. Each of his songs, whether he wrote it, forged it from traditional elements or learned it from his friend and fellow blues tunesmith Willie Dixon, meant something. And he’d convey a song’s particular meaning with all the subtleties at his command –– shaping a note just so, insinuating the slightest delay into the way he turned a phrase, coloring this word with a lupine growl and that one with a graveyard moan.
THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM REGARDING Muddy Waters is that he learned blues in the back country, brought his down-home blues to the city and added electricity and a solid backbeat, thereby laying the groundwork for rock & roll. His story began in Rolling Fork, in the Southern Mississippi Delta near Highway 61, where he was born on April 4th, 1915. His parents separated when he was six months old, and his grandmother took him north to live with her on the Stovall Plantation, in the rich cotton lands near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where John Lee Hooker and many other future blues stars grew to maturity.
As a youngster, Muddy took up the harmonica, and that was the instrument, he played when he began performing at country suppers and picnics in his early teens. But the guitar and the music that men like Son House and Robert Johnson were making with it soon claimed his attention. His formal education had stopped at about the third grade; he never cared for such plantation jobs as driving plow mules, drawing water and chopping cotton, and at age seventeen, he sold a horse to get the money– – about two dollars and fifty cents – –to buy his first guitar, a Stella, from Sears and Roebuck in Chicago. By 1941, when Alan Lomax showed up in Clarksdale and recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress, Muddy was the most powerful and widely esteemed guitarist in his part of the Delta. Lomax returned in 1942 and recorded Muddy again, but these recordings were for the library’s archives, and Muddy wanted to hear his records on jukeboxes. In 1943, he left Mississippi for Chicago, and though friends told him his down-home blues wouldn’t be popular there, he was soon playing at house parties and South Side taverns where the noise level necessitated his switch from acoustic to electric guitar.
Muddy bought his first electric guitar in 1944, and by 1946, he was gigging regularly with Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter. By 1949, Muddy and his band –– which by then included, along with Rogers and Jacobs, Baby Face Leroy Foster doubling on guitar and drums –– were packing in crowds at the Du Drop Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, and also recording for Aristocrat Records, a small Jazz and R & B label whose owners included two Polish-born Jews named Leonard and Phil Chess. When the Chess brothers bought out a partner and changed the name of their label to Chess, Muddy’s “Rollin’ Stone” was their first release. During the early Fifties, his blues hits – –”Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Just Make Love to Me,” “Louisiana Blues,” “Long Distance Call,” “She Moves Me” and the rest – –made him a hero to black fans throughout the South and in all the Midwestern and Northern cities where the population had swelled from Southern migration. In 1958, he played the first electric blues heard in England and launched a rhythm & blues movement that gave birth to groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1960, he introduced young white America to his music, especially “Got My Mojo Working,” the showstopper that would be associated with him from then on.
Muddy Waters: 1915–1983, Page 2 of 5