Guys Read

by Jon Scieszka

  Six months later Lomax sent a check for twenty dollars and two records, with one of Muddy’s recordings on each side. Muddy carried the records up the road to the jukebox at Will McComb’s café, the local juke joint. He listened to them over and over. At night, when people were listening to the jukebox, he’d sneak over and put on his music, watch them listen to it. I can do it, he thought. I can do it. He wasn’t sure just how he was going to do it, but he was determined to quit working in the fields, get out of Mississippi, and be known all over the country for his blues.

  Muddy’s mother had died shortly after he was born on April 4, 1913, and he was raised by his grandmother Della Grant. When he was just a baby, crawling outside in the delta dirt, she gave him his nickname, Muddy. Della was a single woman, working as hard as she could sharecropping on the plantation. The flat, fertile delta soil had to be plowed, planted, hoed, and harvested. Anyone who was big enough to tote a cotton sack and pluck a cotton boll out of its prickly pod had to help out.

  School for the black sharecroppers’ kids was only for a few months in the winter, when they weren’t needed in the field. By third grade Muddy was pulled out of school. Every morning he got up when they rang the 4:00 a.m. bell at the main house. He watered the cows and horses, mules and chickens, then carried buckets of water to the men and women out in the field so they could ladle out a drink. His hands blistered and finally calloused from hauling the heavy water buckets.

  When Muddy was eight years old, he was handed a small cotton sack and told to start picking. Work was “sun to sun,” sunrise to sunset in the broiling heat. Half the money he and his grandmother earned on the cotton went to the Stovalls, since they owned the land.

  But no matter how much work there was in the fields, Sundays were church days, and his grandmother made sure he sat right next to her in the Baptist church every week. Service was exuberant, rising to a feverish pitch of singing and testifying. Muddy loved the full-throated singing and preaching. “I got all of my good moaning and trembling going on for me right out of church,” Muddy said later.

  His grandmother also taught him about the power of hoodoo. How Muddy could ward off bad luck and draw good luck with the right “mojo hand”—a small flannel or leather sack with roots, herbs, coins, and other “conjure” objects inside that had been “fed” by a hoodoo doctor.

  Mojo, hard work, and religion mixed together as Muddy started singing spirituals and blues songs he overheard, beating time on an old metal coal-oil can. Shortly after he left school, he was given a harmonica. He carried it out to the fields, slipping it out of his pocket when he could, getting better and better at coaxing haunting, melancholy notes out of it.

  But he really wanted to play the guitar. He made do by taking an old broom and unwinding the wire that held the straw in place. He tied one end to the wall and then pulled on the other end, changing the slack while he plucked at it to change the pitch.

  The sharecroppers didn’t have running water or electricity, but the lady across the field from Muddy had a hand-crank phonograph. Muddy was over there all the time, putting on a record, winding it up, and listening to music. He was mesmerized by blues players like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Barbecue Bob, and Son House. Muddy thought Roosevelt Stykes playing “44 Blues” on the piano was the best thing he ever heard.

  When Muddy was fourteen, Son House signed on for four Saturdays in a row at a local juke joint. Muddy was there every Saturday, sitting as close as he could, watching House’s hands, listening to his blues. House played a steel guitar with a sharp, percussive sound and sang in a gravelly voice. With a cut-off bottleneck on his little finger, House slid up and down the neck of the guitar. Muddy was awestruck. “That guy could just preach the blues,” Muddy said. “Sit down there, and just play one thing after ’nother, like a preacher.”

  A few years later Muddy sold his grandmother’s last horse for fifteen dollars. He gave $7.50 to his grandmother and kept the other half. For $2.50 he bought a used guitar.

  Muddy practiced whenever he could, but five or six days a week he was out working in the fields for fifty cents a day. While he worked he made up songs. Like most blues, the first and second lines were the same, and the third was different. He sang about women, working the fields, the railroads, anything about the life that was going on around him. “I always felt like I could beat plowin’ mules, choppin’ cotton, and drawin’ water,” Muddy said. “I did all that, and I never did like none of it.”

  Until he could figure out how to get somewhere with his music, though, Muddy needed to figure out how to get by. After being in the field all day, Muddy went out again and set traplines for mink, possum, coon, and rabbit. The mink skins were worth good money for fur coats; the others were good eating. And when the cotton didn’t need workers, there were other crops in the fields that needed harvesting: peas and beans, berries and sugar beets.

  Hopping the freight trains was a good way to move around for free, so long as Muddy kept a sharp eye out so he wasn’t caught and thrown into a labor gang. While Muddy was rambling around, he came up with a song, “Rollin’ Stone.” “I was just like that, like a rollin’ stone,” he said.

  Back on Stovall Plantation a tall, soft-spoken woman, Mabel Berry, caught his eye. She worked alongside him in the plantation fields and had a brother who played the guitar in a local string band, the Son Sims Four. In November 1932, when he was nineteen, he and Mabel married. Muddy had left school without ever learning to write, so he signed the marriage license with an X, and the county clerk wrote out his legal name: McKinley A. Morganfield.

  By the next year Muddy was singing and playing the harmonica with the Son Sims Four. He was also learning fast on his guitar. “We played juke joints, frolics, Saturday-night suppers,” said Muddy. “We was even playing white folks’ parties three or four times a year.” Some nights the parties went on so long, he got home just as the sun was coming up. He’d change back to his cotton-picking clothes and head for the fields.

  When Muddy was twenty-two, he had a baby with another woman, and his wife packed up and left. Muddy started to host his own house parties instead of just playing at other people’s. Saturday nights he’d move the beds out of the house, stick a string wick in a glass bottle, fill it with coal oil, and hang it outside. It was so quiet in the country at night, people could hear Muddy’s guitar long before they got close. It was so flat out in the delta, they could see the light shining through the trees from far off. Inside there was gambling, drinking moonshine, and dancing to Muddy’s music.

  One night a stranger showed up at Muddy’s and kept winning at dice. Muddy figured he must have a “strong mojo hand,” maybe even one from Louisiana, where the hoodoo doctors made the best ones. A powerful mojo hand could give good luck in gambling, or seducing a woman, or making snakes and frogs pour out of an enemy’s mouth. Muddy leaned in close to the man and slipped a pinch of red pepper in his coat pocket and secretly sprinkled salt on the floor around him. The stranger’s luck turned bad, and he gambled away everything, even the shoes on his feet.

  Muddy figured he’d killed the man’s mojo. Instead of using his winnings for something practical, he went to a nearby hoodoo doctor to buy his own mojo hand. The doctor wrote in tiny letters on a scrap of paper and sealed it in an envelope instead of a flannel sack. He dabbed it with perfume to fix it, and told Muddy never to open the envelope. A couple of years later, after losing all his money in a dice game, Muddy got mad and tore open the envelope. He had somebody read the paper to him. It just had “you win, I win, you win, I win” scribbled on it. Muddy had always believed in mojo, but now, for the first time, he felt like he’d been conned.

  Muddy was getting so good at playing the blues that people were coming to see him every Saturday night wherever he played. He wanted a bigger audience than just the local Saturday night fish fries and local juke joints. He knew his singing and playing were good, and not just with the people around him in the Delta. Lomax had even come back a second time to record him.
But Muddy wasn’t sure just how to break loose.

  Robert Nighthawk, a local blues player, came to see Muddy and told him he was going to Chicago. He invited Muddy to come along. “I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago,” Muddy said. “I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world.” He asked his friends who had been to Chicago if he could make it there with his guitar, but they told him nobody was listening to those old-fashioned blues in Chicago. It was a jazz town.

  Finally, in May 1943, Muddy figured he’d better find out for himself and bought a one-way ticket on the Illinois Central Railroad. With a suitcase in one hand and his guitar in the other, he boarded the train for Chicago.

  The train slowed as it pulled into the city and chugged through miles of brick tenement buildings, the back porches built right up next to the tracks. Central Station was in the middle of the South Side, filled to the breaking point with African Americans who’d come up from the South.

  Muddy had the address of his younger half sister who’d moved to Chicago. He stepped out of the train, clutching his suitcase and guitar, completely overwhelmed. “It looked like this was the fastest place in the world—cabs dropping fares, horns blowing, the peoples walking so fast.” A taxicab whooshed up and Muddy got in. They sped through the streets, huge buildings looming on either side. To Muddy, the enormous apartment complexes all looked alike. How would he find his sister in all this madness?

  The driver pulled up to a building, checked the names on the door, and said Muddy’s sister and her husband, Dan Jones, lived on the fourth floor. There was no bell. Muddy was scared to death to be deserted in this big, frantic city, so he insisted the taxi driver wait while he walked up the wooden staircase to the fourth floor. To Muddy’s huge relief, his sister and her husband were there. He retrieved his belongings from the cab and was told he could sleep on the couch.

  Muddy’s luck changed at lightning speed. By that night he’d found a job in a container factory. Now he had a place to stay and money in his pocket. Saturday nights Muddy’s sister would hold “rent parties”—friends who’d migrated up from Mississippi would show up with a little whiskey to share and drop off a donation toward the Joneses’ rent. Muddy spent the evenings playing and singing, drinking, and having a good time.

  Muddy kept singing his songs about mojo, even though now he didn’t believe in it so wholeheartedly. He still thought maybe if somebody got the hair off the top of your head, they could make you have headaches by burying it or putting it in running water. Maybe. But not frogs and snakes jumping out of your mouth. But he couldn’t leave out mojo. It was wrapped up deep in the music, and just about everybody listening to him believed in it. There were even advertisements in the African-American newspapers like the Chicago Defender for hoodoo doctors and conjure materials to turn your luck around. “We played so many times, ‘I’m goin’ down to Louisiana/ Get me a mojo hand,’” Muddy said, “and I tried to make it a picture so you could see it, just like you’re lookin’ at it.”

  Word spread fast about Muddy. He started playing other rent parties, then house parties, where he’d be paid five dollars for the evening. Between that and his regular job, he put together enough money to get his own apartment.

  Things kept breaking Muddy’s way. He got his first good musical job at the Flame Club on the South Side. He’d made about seventy-five cents a day in the cotton fields; now he was earning fifty-two dollars a week playing guitar as a “sideman” for an old friend, Eddie Boyd. Eddie left and was replaced by Sunnyland Slim. Muddy quickly realized his wooden acoustic guitar was fine for the house parties, but in the crowded, noisy city clubs, he needed to be louder. He bought an amplifier and an electric guitar. By playing every chance he could, he gradually moved up from a sideman to being the leader of his own band.

  Muddy even found a better day job, delivering venetian blinds. He’d get to work at eight thirty, deliver the blinds, and by one he was home taking a long nap, because he was staying up till all hours playing music five nights a week. Sunnyland Slim was offered a chance to record, and on the day he was scheduled to record, the producer decided they needed a guitar player. Sunnyland jumped on the streetcar up to Muddy’s place and tracked him down on his delivery schedule. Muddy called his boss and said his mother had died and made it down to Universal Studios in time for the session. He sang two songs, “Gypsy Woman” and a song about trouble with his girlfriend, “Little Anna Mae.” He didn’t play bottleneck guitar but tried to make the songs fit in with a newer, jazzier style of blues. To Muddy’s intense disappointment, when the songs were released they didn’t sell well.

  But in 1948 Muddy got another chance to record, this time with producer Leonard Chess. Muddy did a couple of his favorite delta numbers, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home.” This time he stuck with his bottleneck-guitar playing, singing traditional delta blues styles. The songs were released and distributed the way most race records were: copies were dropped off at a few local record stores but mostly left at barbershops, hair salons, and hardware stores.

  The record cost 79 cents. The morning after its release, Muddy hustled down to the Maxwell Radio Record Company to buy a few copies. The man behind the counter would sell him only one, for $1.19, even when Muddy insisted it was his record. That day the first pressing sold out. Chess rushed to make a second pressing.

  Muddy was thrilled. He’d drive around in his truck, see a bar, and go inside to check out what was on the jukebox. Sometimes he’d get a beer and sit and listen to his song, not telling anybody it was him. Soon he started hearing it on the street, coming out of the apartments when he drove by.

  Muddy and Sunnyland Slim recorded another session together, then went their separate ways. Sunnyland moved to another record label, but Muddy stuck with Chess. He thought Chess was the best man in the business. They never drew up a written contract, just had a gentleman’s agreement. Chess, like Muddy, was a good judge of character. He ran his company based on good business instincts and an amazing array of superstitions. Some of his superstitions were from his early childhood in a tiny, all-Jewish village in Poland. Some he adopted from his blues players. Others seemed to have come out of thin air. Chess would never schedule a session on Fridays, or on the thirteenth of the month, but he liked the seventh or the eleventh. After Muddy’s breakout hit record, Chess wanted the same bass player for the next session and insisted he wear the same red shirt he’d worn before.

  Most blues players sang sad blues, but Muddy was different. He’d get out there to perform, and he’d jump on the song. It looked simple and easy, but it wasn’t easy to perform with him or sing like him. He called himself a “delay singer,” singing just a fraction behind the instruments. It forced his band to stay totally focused on him. They had to be ready to follow him in an instant, intuitively understanding where he was going next, before he even got there.

  Six nights a week Muddy would perform wherever he was asked. He kept recording with Chess, and his records often made the national rhythm and blues (R & B) charts. In 1954 Muddy had the two biggest hits of his career, with “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and “I’m Ready” cracking R & B’s top five.

  There was no stopping Muddy now. He quit his job, and his songs like “Rollin’ Stone,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Just Make Love to Me” hit high on the charts. Muddy hooked up with other blues musicians like Little Walter, Baby Face Leroy, and Jimmy Rogers. There was a side benefit as well: Women found him irresistible. Muddy married again and had babies with his wife and several with his girlfriends.

  In 1953 Muddy’s friend Otis Spann got out of the army and joined Muddy, playing the piano. Muddy had developed a big sound with a strong back beat on the drums, plus the guitar and harmonica and piano. “I had it in my head,” Muddy said, “that the piano always was a blues instrument and belonged with my blues.” All those strong sidemen gave him a full bed of music, filling up the cracks and holes, the empty spaces between
his guitar and his voice. For the next ten years, Spann on the piano and James Cotton playing the harmonica formed the heart of Muddy’s band.

  But by the late 1950s, things started to slack off for Muddy. The blues popularity was fading fast. The African-American generation coming up, raised in Chicago, couldn’t relate to hard times in the Deep South picking cotton. They weren’t interested in the dark magic of hoodoo, juke joints, and bootleg liquor. It was a past they didn’t want any part of. Black kids identified with the growing soul sound. Chicago blues clubs were closing, radio stations were playing soul music and rock and roll, and records by white stars like Elvis were selling like hotcakes. A friend of Muddy’s, Cadillac Baby, complained, “These young people don’t know nothin’ about no blues, they don’t feel it, they’ve had too good a way to go.”

  But Muddy still had a loyal audience in the Deep South, where he’d take his band and go on tour. “People there, they feel the blues and that makes me feel good,” Muddy said. “They pay two, three dollars a time to come in. Mebbe they don’t eat the next day, but, man, the place is really jumpin’!” No matter how he tried back in Chicago, he couldn’t raise the same enthusiasm.

  In 1958 Muddy was invited to tour in England. He was eager to see what kind of audience he’d get. English teenagers were forming “skiffle bands,” playing with washboard, guitar, and a simple drum set. A few had even started playing rock and roll, like the Americans. Muddy’s tour was a disappointment, and he returned to an even smaller American audience.

  But he was still in love with the blues and had a feeling things were going to change. A few young whites were sneaking into the Chicago blues clubs now, eager to hear him play. “I have a feeling a white is going to get it and really put over the blues,” he said. “I know they feel it, but I don’t know if they can deliver the message.”