7 less weight equals less pay: Each cotton sack is weighed at day’s end and then emptied into a cotton house, a shed on wheels that shuttles between the field and the gin. A 500-pound bale requires 1,300 pounds of boll. The seed accounts for the difference. It takes a lot of seedless cotton to create some weight.
8 A plantation was a privately owned small town: Not that the black people living in Mississippi’s towns were any better treated. Blues musician Johnny Shines summed it up: “Down South, it was open season on black folk. Kill ’em anywhere you see ’em.” (Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl, produced and directed by Peter Meyer.)
8 “brozine”: Many plantations used their own scrip, a tender good only at their plantation store. Among the items available there — at prices set above market value — were kitchen staples such as flour and lard, basic hunting and fishing supplies, and coal oil, clothes, stick candy, and hair straighteners.
9 “she furnished for me and my uncle”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
10 “I never did see my dad”: Welding, “An Interview.”
10 People grew what they ate: “We had our own horses, mules, cows, goats, and chickens, and I watered ’em from the time I was a kid,” Muddy told Robert Palmer in Deep Blues (p. 100). “I had to pump the water, and that pump would put blisters in my hand. Even for one cow, you got to pump a lot of water. She’d take two draws out of those big tubs and that’d be it.”
12 “I started early on, burning corn stumps”: Wyler and Ragsdale interview with Muddy Waters.
13 “they didn’t give you too much schooling”: Oliver, Conversation, p. 30.
13 Reverend Willie Morganfield: Lewis Morganfield’s seventh son was Willie Morganfield, who, along with two of his brothers, followed his father into preaching. And, like his first cousin, the Reverend Willie Morganfield also became a singer, though his million-selling hits were gospel, not blues. “What Is This,” recorded for Jewel Records in 1959 (a company run by friends of the Chess brothers), is perhaps his best-known recording, although many of his songs and sermons remain in print. He was born on Stovall and was raised there and in Clarksdale, moved away in 1945, and returned in 1975. He has lived in bigger and smaller cities, preached from some of the nation’s largest pulpits, and is currently pastor at Clarksdale’s Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church. He spoke from behind the desk of his church office, a basement room adorned with plaques, letters of commendation, and gold records. He has had three heart attacks and continues to smoke heavily.
14 The blues began taking shape: The blending of the African American and Scots traditions explains the plethora of lyrics and melodies common to both blues and bluegrass. For more information, see Tom Mazzolini’s “A Conversation with Paul Oliver” in Living Blues.
14 the lyrical shape of AAB: John Work’s unpublished manuscript includes this note about the AAB lyrical structure:
In the singing of the blues there is seen an intense subconscious esthetic demand that the third line — the punch line — have a rhyming last word. The entire thought of the singer most often is expressed in this last line. The first line and its repetition may contribute to it, but more often it does not. The prime aim of the singer therefore is to provide preliminary lines with a rhyming last word for the end of the last line. Frequently these preliminary lines are “nonsense” in their relation to the last line. Here are several illustrations extracted from Delta blues: “Brook run into the ocean, ocean run into the sea / If I can’t find my baby now/somebody going have to bury me.” “Minutes seem like hours / hours seem like days / Seems like my baby / would stop her low down ways.” “You know the sun is going down I say / behind that old western hill / You know I wouldn’t do a thing / not against my baby’s will.” (Work, Fisk Archives)
14 “delay singer”: Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 102.
14 The earliest description of blues: Peabody, “Notes on Negro Music,” p. 149.
Another interesting note from his article states: “In their refrains ending on the tonic, they sometimes sang the last note somewhat sharp. So frequent was this that it seemed intentional or unavoidable, not merely a mistake in pitch” (p. 151). And:
The long, lonely sing-song of the fields was quite distinct from anything else, though the singer was skillful in gliding from hymn-motives to those of the native chant. The best single recollection I have of this music is one evening when a Negress was singing her baby to sleep in her cabin just above our tents. She was of quite a notable Negro family and had a good voice. Her song was to me quite impossible to copy, weird in interval and strange in rhythm; peculiarly beautiful. It bore some likeness to the modern Greek native singing but was better done. I only heard her once in a lullaby, but she used sometimes to walk the fields at evening singing fortissimo, awakening the echoes with song extremely effective. I should not omit mention of a very old Negro employed on the plantation of Mr. John Stovall of Stovall, Mississippi. He was asked to sing to us one very dark night as we sat on the gallery. His voice as he sang had a timbre resembling a bagpipe played pianissimo or a Jew’s harp played legato, and to some indistinguishable words he hummed a rhythm of no regularity and notes apparently not more than three or more in number at intervals within a semi-tone. The effect again was monotonous but weird, not far from Japanese. I have not heard that kind again nor of it. (p. 152)
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
The spirituals can no longer be said to be “the natural expression of the mind and the mood of the plantation Negro” of today, for the “natural idiom of the Negro proletarian, the blues,” is used to express the plantation Negro’s mood of the present. In the past the plantation Negro sang of “the Pearly Gates and Dem Golden Slippers” as compensation for the hard life of this world, but now he expresses the realities of today by singing:
. . . Done worked all the summer
. . . Done worked all the fall
And here come Christmas
And I ain’t got nothing at all
I’m just a po’ cold nigger. (Adams, Manuscript, Lomax Archives)
The church’s diminishing sway was also evident in children’s songs. One older version was:
Turn to the east
Turn to the west
Turn to the one you love the best.
But approaching midcentury, the words had been changed:
Shake it to the east
Shake it to the west
Give it to the young man you love the best.
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: MAN, I CAN SING 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’ th
e 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.
Muddy was known to favor a party. A house band led by Robert Nighthawk is no slouch act. Muddy had known Son House for three years, Big Joe Williams was regularly passing through, and Charlie Patton was still alive. Other possible guests included the elusive James Smith, Brownie Emerson the bootlegger, Myles Long before he was saved, and Andrew Bolton in his youth — oh, but for a wedding photographer!
29 “They was high-time through there”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
29 “Anytime they’s in my vicinity”: O’Neal and van Singel interview with Muddy Waters.
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