Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  MUDDY WATERS: AUGUST 31, 1941

  By Robert Gordon

  [From Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, 2002]

  By the early 1940s, Muddy [Waters] was famous in his “circle we was going in,” the skinny strip of Delta that fanned out from Clarksdale to the Mississippi River along Number One Highway. There were plenty of little back-road juke houses along there—he’d never want for a job—but it wasn’t exactly international fame.

  Muddy Waters’ first real break into the outside world came in the summer of 1941, during a field recording trip under the combined auspices of Nashville’s Fisk University and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He made his first recordings that summer and then several more the following summer when the group returned; a year after that, with the courage of a recording veteran, he would leave the Delta for Chicago. These encounters were perhaps the most crucial to his future career…

  Searching for funds to finance the trip, Fisk contacted the Library of Congress. Their Archive of American Folk Song, in the person of folklorist Alan Lomax, recognized the strength of the project and agreed to collaborate. His father, John Lomax, had been associated with the Archive since soon after its founding in 1928. Alan became the Archive’s first full-time employee in 1937. [Fisk’s] study jibed with the Lomax family’s perception of “folklore,” a more malleable notion than the reigning tradition in which the oldest songs—dating prior to the Industrial Revolution (indeed prior to the printing press) and unchanged by time—were considered purest; Alan and his father believed that the living folk and their input were as vital as the original source of the material…

  On Sunday, August 31,1941, Lomax and Fisk professor John Work arrived early and unannounced on the Stovall Plantation. They sought Captain Holt, the friendly, pipe-smoking overseer, and gained permission to mix with the black population, especially one “Muddy Water.” The singer, suspicious of being busted by a conniving moonshiner, came to the commissary before this stranger could find him at home. The trust between them was established by Lomax’s guitar, sealed with a whiskey, and then Lomax began setting up the equipment that Muddy had helped bring in. Lomax did not like for Work to handle the equipment. Son Sims had appeared by the time the bottle was being uncorked, and he accompanied Muddy on their original song “Burr Clover Blues” so recording levels could be set. While Lomax made final adjustments with the knobs, John Work conducted a brief interview with the two musicians. Asked to state their names, Muddy identified himself as “Name McKinley Morganfield, nickname Muddy Water,” then added, “Stovall’s famous guitar picker.”

  And so, after lunch and before supper, Muddy Waters recorded one of the songs for which he was known in his neck of the Delta and for which he would later become known throughout the world. “Country Blues” was the name Lomax appended to it; “I Feel Like Going Home” was the title in John Work’s notes and the title when it took Chicago by storm a few years later. These first recordings were quite different from the electric versions Muddy would later record. They were about the marriage of acoustic space created by the human voice and a wooden guitar. “You get more pure thing out of an acoustic,” Muddy later reflected. “I prefer an acoustic.” The power in Muddy’s playing is comparable to the way a blade cuts rows into a field; his music is informed and defined by the immediacy of touching a string and the knowledge of how it affects the air around it.

  Photographer Dorothea Lange captured this Mississippi plantation overseer and his crew of sharecroppers in 1941.

  After Muddy completed “Country Blues,” the recording captured him leaning back in his chair, a creaking, and then a bassy rumbling that becomes recognizable: footsteps crossing a wooden floor. It was Lomax, not stopping until he was right next to Muddy; he was speaking into the microphone when he said, “I wonder if you can tell me, if you can remember, when it was that you made that blues, Muddy Water?”

  Muddy answered straight away, a bit anxious and almost stepping on Lomax’s question. “I made that blues up in ‘38.”

  “Do you remember the time of the year?”

  “I made it up about the eighth of October in ‘38.” Muddy clustered his words together, with a halting nervousness between them.

  Lomax inquired in a comfortable, almost intimate voice. By this point, he, Work, and Muddy had been together several hours, during which Muddy had seen this untold dream unfold and assemble itself in his very living room. Lomax, realizing he could capture Muddy while the mood still hung, got close and casual.

  “I remember thinking how low-key Morganfield was, grave even to the point of shyness,” Lomax wrote in his field notes. “But I was bowled over by his artistry. There was nothing uncertain about his performances. He sang and played with such finesse, with such a mercurial and sensitive relation between voice and guitar and he expressed so much tenderness in the way he handled his lyrics that he went right beyond all his predecessors—Blind Lemon, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown. His own pieces were more than blues, they were love songs of the Deep South, gently erotic and deeply sentimental.”

  Lomax’s questions continued: “Do you remember where you were when you were doing your singing, how it happened?”

  “—No, I—”

  “No, I mean, where you were sitting, what you were thinking about?”

  “I was fixing the punction [puncture] on a car, and I had been mistreated by a girl and it looked like that run in my mind to sing that song.”

  “Tell me a little of the story of it if you don’t mind, if it’s not too personal. I want to know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. It’s a very beautiful song.”

  This white man complimented the field hand, and he answered like an artist: “Well, I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind, come to me just like that song I started to sing and went on with it.”

  Muddy may not have been in the boisterous voice he’d have when frying Saturday fish sandwiches and laughing with friends, but he was loosening up. Things were working out.

  A RIFF ON READING STERLING PLUMPP’S POETRY BY JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

  Blues announces the end of the world—the old world you’ve known or thought you knew till the blues jumps up and grunts, Huh-huh, no-no-no, boy, it ain’t like that at all. Here’s something more for you to learn, to cry over or grin about or celebrate or mourn. Don’t you ever forget there’s always the break, the hesitation, hitch between one beat, one word, one note, one line, one breath and the next. Slide and glide as best you can, my friend, there’s still the unexpected you got to deal with—falling down, falling up, Lawd, Lawd-shit. Greatgooga-mooga—turn me on, turn me down, turn me all around, turn me loose. The world ain’t what it used to be, spozed to be, only exactly what its Big Bad Wolf self wants to be—so lissen up and don’t be getting too far ahead of yourself, uh-huh.

  No essay here—rather, a riff on reading Sterling Plumpp’s poetry, on reading any words on a page that want to sing the blues, any writing aspiring to attain the metaphorical, spiritual, and material complexities of blues music.

  Three abiding qualities distinguish Plumpp’s best work (and recapitulate blues tradition). Focus: intense, compressed (becoming even more clipped, enigmatic, dense, and cryptic in his most recent writing), blues a sort of navel or blade of grass he gazes at to see the entire universe. Discipline: He contains his ambitious project within a single idiom of African-American musical style. Variety: In spite of intense discipline and focus, he manages to swing—to range widely, freely, and achieve, like blues, an amazing allusiveness, capaciousness of tone, subject matter, form, scene, voice within his chosen realm. Bluesmen and classical composers have been inspired to set his lyrics to music.

  And one—bluesmen and women and songs and themes and attitudes as ways of figuring, modeling, representing a reality the poetry seeks to communicate.

  And two—the effort to wring from the music a philosophic inquiry with blues as worldview, as cons
olation and rumination, a long quarrel and tentative reconciliation with godhead or god-long-gone. Blues (through paraphrase, analysis, contradiction, dialogue) as a path for coming to terms with existence.

  And three—blues forms, translated or paralleled or suggested through the techniques of written poetry; blues as poetry/poetry as blues; to what degree are their structures and rhetoric mutually intelligible—are they wary, compatible, welcoming—how/why/when. Think about the multidimensional singing space—how it implicates all the senses, how performing a song employs time as duration and rhythmic beat and intimate, shared presence. How is time embodied in reading, in written poetry’s line breaks, line length, stanzaic patterns, refrains, spacing (is space silence), rhyme, meter, repetition, direct address, the mimicking of vernacular dialect. Can typography capture melisma, slurring, noises, rolling eyes, call and response, sing-along choruses, the showmanship and foolishness acted out onstage.

  Hit it—ain’t nothing but a party, so let’s just play—play the blues—blues always a fugue of tradition, dream, impossibility, invention—changes sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous. Plumpp attempts print analogues of characteristic blues devices such as the repeated, cumulative urgency of a “shout”—an unchanging (yet always different because of context) word or refrain beginning each line of a poem. He tells stories simply, directly, and no matter how personal the subject, tells them with minimal particularizing clutter so they stand for, invite the collective drama as echo, affirmation. Can I hear somebody say, Amen.

  Technical craftsmanship and taking chances saturate Sterling Plumpp’s work in the blues medium. Just as important is his formidable sense of self. Whether in Mississippi or Capetown, South Africa, the poet writes with profound assurance of being rooted. He knows exactly who he is, where he’s from—even when (especially) he poses as somebody else. Not that he uncritically approves or romanticizes. Or brags. Or is blase. Not that he doesn’t brag or profile or strut or seem quite satisfied with himself. Point is he doesn’t stand still. He owns up to paradoxes and inconsistencies, the flat-out wars within his heart, soul, body, and mind. Because that’s the portable place he really comes from. His unfinished business on the planet. The song he keeps on singing.

  “In 1965, as a twenty-year-old poet living in a rooming house in Pittsburgh, I discovered Bessie Smith and the blues. It was a watershed event in my life. It gave me history. It provided me with a cultural response to the world as well as the knowledge that the text and content of my life were worthy of the highest celebration and occasion of art. It also gave me a framework and an aesthetic for exploring the tradition from which it grew. I set out on a continual search for ways to give expression to the spiritual impulse of the African-American culture which had nurtured and sanctioned my life and ultimately provided it with its meaning. I was, as are all artists, searching for a way to define myself in relation to the world I lived in. The blues gave me a firm and secure ground. It became, and remains, the wellspring of my art.”—August Wilson

  Paradox: Part of what he knows about himself is, of course, the blues—the blues forever mysterious, irreducible, open-ended, Promethean, in-progress, questions not answers. You never get the sense the poetry or poet claims to know what’s coming next, nor that the past, intimidating as it can be, is a done deal. Performance embodies tension—the troubadour moving on down the line. The mode of discovery of blues is checking what might work this time out. The poet or singer shares with the audience the particulars of a fragile truce he or she has achieved at some moment or another and seeks to reanimate the feel of that experience.

  Though blues depends on an established tradition, and we can predict (foretaste) the 4/4 time, percussive polymetric rhythms, gravelly gutbucket tonalities, falsetto shrieks, field hollers, anticipate rimes and formulaic lines from the standard repertoire, the tags beginning or ending songs if they ask you who sang this song, tell ‘em, Sterling, been here and gone, each time we step on board, the blues, our destination’s uncertain. We’re suspended in the medium, by the medium. We won’t know there till we go there.

  Yes, plenty of oft-used couplets, familiar patterns, sounds. Then here come Skip James, Son House, Robert Johnson, bending and extending notes till they’re eerie and haunted; disruptive intrusions that gradually turn solid and shapely; sure-handed as fists gripping the wooden handles of an old-time plow must be to dance metal and mule in directions they don’t want to go or know better than to go, won’t go unless there’s a boss driving, digging, holding on for a long, steady furrow, for a good groove cutting so deep it’s not exactly man nor mule nor plow in charge but the earth saying, “Yes, I’ll let you go there this time.” Blues voices sculpting sound like Giacometti elongates the human body, worries his people’s bronze skin, pinching, gouging, twisting, compressing a freshly roughened surface to bear the ruins of its history.

  Plumpp’s poems conduct a kind of research upon the body of blues tradition—research in which he tests himself, tests his body to determine how it responds to the knowledge, the challenge blues transmits. Letting go. Getting it on. I feel something large at stake when I engage his poems. A simple utterance, bare and skimpy-looking on the page, seizes my attention; its spareness and immediacy makes me believe he wants me to hear what he’s saying. The seeming transparency of the utterance complicates it. A piece of business, bigger, more concrete than either of us. A sense of sharing, of common ground is palpable. Together we’re figuring out something important.

  The

  birth of chaos

  is the embryo of my songs

  voices I collect bits of nights

  crushed by blind winds

  [from Plumpp’s Blues Inside His

  Breathing (1997)]

  I’m a prose writer, so when I talk about Sterling Plumpp’s poetry, I’m also thinking about what I demand from all kinds of good writing: surprise, subtlety, style, a self-consciousness of language as medium. I search for proof that words can be reeducated, revitalized, saved. The best writing suggests implicitly or explicitly how readers must participate in the making of words/worlds. For abundant evidence that Plumpp’s writing accomplishes these tasks, see for instance: “Turf Song,” “Blues From the Bloodseed,” or “Sander’s Bottoms” (from Johannesburg and Other Poems).

  Plumpp makes me feel he feels—feels powerfully about something he’s willing and able to express with eloquence. I’m hit again and again by the tenacity of his spirit’s questing, the single-minded pursuit, unrelenting importance and urgency he projects about the task of identifying, locating, then squeezing truth and pleasure from his blues roots. As I read, I’m learning about a person, a stance, a bottom line—inherited, internalized, recreated, extended to poetry.

  Many of his poems are dedicated to famous blues artists, others to anonymous blues people. Some celebrate well-known heroes of various third world and domestic liberation struggles, many are addressed to family members, friends, and acquaintances, a few to the art of blues itself. Dedications are signs of generosity. Poems become a means of saying thanks, of returning bounty for bounty, replenishing the sources, the tradition. Poems are political in the best sense because they honor debts, commemorate the necessity of conscious struggle, of paying dues, paying back. I’m grateful for the gift—beguiled, intrigued, enlightened by Plumpp’s project so far—how he takes and gives.

  Finally, and maybe most important, his blues poems make me want to write.

  THANK GOD FOR ROBERT JOHNSON BY ELMORE LEONARD

  Son House said there was only one kind of blues: something between a man and a woman, one deceiving or walking out on the other. Any situation different than that, Son House said, was “monkey junk.” My experience with the blues goes back to the early 1930s, when I was a little kid in Memphis, and the voices of Mildred Bailey and Billie Holiday caught my ear. It was only about ten years ago that I learned Mildred Bailey was white, and I could not believe it. In my memory of her voice and phrasing, she never sounded like a white woman
.

  In 1941 we paid Woody Herman seven hundred dollars to bring his herd to the University of Detroit High School for Gala Night. He closed with his theme song, the dirgelike “Blue Flame,” and it’s been my favorite big-band blues number ever since, placing it just above Earl Hines’ “After Hours” and the Basie Orchestra behind Joe Williams doing “Every Day I Have the Blues.” During high school I was into black bands almost exclusively, and I saw Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy with Mary Lou Williams—all of them at the Paradise Theatre in Detroit—on their way to or from New York’s Apollo. What used to be the Paradise is now the home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

  In January 1946 I got off a Navy ship at Treasure Island, had my first glass of milk in over a year—couldn’t finish it, too rich—and raced over to a ballroom in Oakland to see Stan Kenton. The high point was standing close to the stage and staring up at June Christy doing “Buzz Me.”