Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Slim sounded magnificent, rapping out tone clusters in the treble and walking the basses with all the authority of someone who’s been playing the blues for sixty-odd years. “I don’t like to play in these kind of places no more,” he said during a break, pushing his face up close to be heard over the buzz of conversation and the B.B. King record on the jukebox. “I’ll be seventy-two soon. I just been out to California, playin’ in Europe… I’m just down here helping Louis out on his gig.” Muddy’s name came up. “Me and Muddy started out together at the same time,” he said. “I brought him in to play guitar for me when I got the call to make a record, 1947. We did a couple of my numbers, and then the man asked me, ‘Say, what about your boy there? Can he sing?’ Talkin’ about Muddy, you know. And I said, ‘Like a bird.’“

  Sunnyland met Muddy Waters at the Flame Club on Chicago’s South Side sometime in the mid-forties. It was Muddy’s first really decent musical job, fifty-two dollars a week as guitar accompanist to his old friend Eddie Boyd. He was still holding down a day job as well. His musical engagements in Chicago up to that point, had included house parties with guitarists Jimmy Rogers and Lee Brown, occasional out-of-town gigs with John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson (who was drinking more and more and seems to have appreciated the fact that Muddy owned a car and was willing to drive to nearby towns like Gary and back to Chicago overnight), and a few informal tavern engagements in West Side joints that paid five dollars a night, if that, with Rogers on harmonica and Blue Smitty (Claude Smith, from Marianna, in the Arkansas Delta) on second guitar. During the course of these jobs Muddy picked up, largely from Smitty, a rudimentary but adequate knowledge of guitar styles that were at the time considered “modern.” When he came to Chicago, he was limited to Delta-style bottleneck playing, while Smitty’s more urban style has been described … as “an awkward compendium of such diverse influences as [Big Boy] Crudup, Yank Rachell, and [the jazz guitarist] Charlie Christian.” It was a single-string lead guitar style, a more basic version of the kind of melodic runs and fill-ins a jazz guitarist might play behind a singer.

  The sophisticated jump blues of performers like Louis Jordan and smooth blues ballads, as sung by Charles Brown, Nat “King” Cole, and other California-based artists, were the latest trends in black popular music, and these were the sounds Eddie Boyd was purveying at the Flame Club. Despite the coaching he’d had from Smitty, Muddy just didn’t fit in. “Eddie wanted me to play like Johnny Moore,” he says, referring to the fluent, jazzy guitarist who picked tastefully behind Charles Brown. “He wanted it to be a sweet kind of blues.” But then Sonny Boy Williamson offered Boyd a better-paying job playing for steel mill workers in Gary, and he left the Blue Flame; Sunnyland Slim replaced him. With Sunnyland and Muddy playing strong Delta bass patterns, Blue Smitty filling in modern-style leads, and all three singing, they had a jumping little combo. But Smitty kept sweet-talking various women and disappearing into a nearby hotel when he was supposed to be on the bandstand, and one evening he drank too much and made the mistake of picking a fight with Sunnyland. As a result, the band lost their job, and their next gig at the Cotton Club as well.

  By that time, Sunnyland had had enough of Smitty, but he liked Muddy. They were both from the Delta, both old enough to be serious and professional about their music (Muddy was in his early thirties, Sunnyland almost forty), both proud, dignified men who showed up for work well dressed and sober—even if they didn’t always stay that way all night. “I got drunk and got in a fight once on that job with Eddie Boyd,” Muddy admits. “I was foolin’ around with one of them little ol’ girls. She made good money and was paying the note on a car, and she started it all. I throwed all the whiskey bottles they had on the table, and when I got through, I went behind the bar and started throwing them whiskey bottles. They put me in jail overnight. But mostly, you know, I didn’t do that. I wanted to be nationally known, and I worked on it.” Sunnyland stayed in touch.

  In September 1946, Lester Melrose arranged a session for Columbia Records featuring three unknown blues vocalists. Sunnyland, who was asked to play piano on the session, made sure one of them was Muddy. (The other two, Homer Harris and James “Beale Street” Clark, rapidly dropped from sight.) Muddy and Harris played guitars, Sunnyland filled in the sound with his rolling upper register tremolos, and an unidentified bassist and drummer carried the rhythm. Muddy tried his best to sound modern. He picked simple single-string lead figures and heavy boogie basses on his three vocal selections, and his bottleneck was nowhere in evidence. His singing was strong but restrained. The result was a set of recordings that were slick and shallow compared to what Muddy could do but too downhome, it seems, for Columbia. The company released nothing from the session, and Lester Melrose, the kingpin of Chicago blues recording for more than a decade, let the city’s next and eventually its biggest blues star slip through his fingers.

  By this time Muddy was working days at “the best job I ever had in my life,” driving a delivery truck for a company that manufactured Venetian blinds. “After I learned all the calls in the city,” he says, “I’d take my load out at eight-thirty, and by one in the afternoon I’d be back at my house—in the bed. Around four-thirty I’d get up and carry the mail to the post office—boom!— I’m through. I had to sleep ‘cause I was playing five nights a week.”

  “For me, to be able to make a record with Muddy Waters [The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album], that was the pinnacle of success. And after the playing was over, of course, I’d get to go out and eat supper with him. Man!”—Levon Helm

  Sometime in 1947 Sunnyland arranged to record a session for Aristocrat, a company that had been started earlier that year by two Polish-born Jews, Leonard and Phil Chess, along with a woman named Evelyn Aran. The Chess brothers, who arrived in the United States in 1928, had worked hard; by 1947 they owned several bars and clubs on the South Side, including the Macomba, where popular jazz and rhythm & blues artists performed. Their first Aristocrat releases were strictly jazz and city R&B, but Sammy Goldstein, the company’s talent scout, thought Aristocrat might do well in the blues field and called Sunnyland to arrange a session. It was going to be a duo, with Big Crawford on bass, but late in the game someone, probably Goldstein, suggested the addition of a guitarist, and Sunnyland thought of Muddy. “I caught the streetcar up there to Muddy’s house,” the pianist recalls, “and [his live-in girlfriend] Annie Mae told me he was out with the truck. The session was for two o’clock.” A friend of Muddy’s, Antra Bolton, was there visiting and offered to track Muddy down, and since his delivery routine rarely varied, it didn’t take long. Muddy had been disheartened by the Columbia experience and wasn’t about to let another opportunity to get on records pass him by. He called his boss, explained in a voice shaking with emotion that his cousin had been murdered in a ghetto alley, turned the truck over to Bolton, who finished the run, hurried home to get his guitar, and made it on time to Universal Studios, on North Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago, for the session.

  First Sunnyland recorded two numbers, including one of his best, “Johnson Machine Gun,” a violent urban fantasy with a touch of sinister humor. “I’m gonna buy me a Johnson machine gun,” he sang, with a high, slightly pinched sound that was more than a little reminiscent of Dr. Clayton, “and a carload of explosion balls/I’m gonna be a walkin’ cyclone, from Saginaw to the Niagara Falls.” The song began as a boast and ended as a threat: “Now, little girl, the undertaker’s been here, girl, and I gave him your height and size/Now if you don’t be makin’ whoopee with the Devil tomorrow this time, baby, God knows you’ll be surprised.” After he recorded the more conventional “Fly Right, Little Girl,” someone, again probably Goldstein, asked him if Muddy could sing. Characteristically, Muddy was ready, this time with two tightly composed original blues that were much better than the mostly traditional material he’d recorded for Columbia. “Little Anna Mae,” the second number he recorded, was a personal account of trouble with his live-in girlfriend; “Gypsy Woman” was
more intriguing: “… Well now you know I went to a gypsy woman to have my fortune told/Say you better go back home, son, and peek through your, your keyhole/You know the gypsy woman told me that you your mother’s bad luck child/Well you’re havin’ a good time now, but that’ll be trouble after while…”

  Muddy still thought people wanted to hear modern guitar playing, not his Delta bottleneck blues, and once again he played single-string lead lines. But his work was much improved—he sounded something like Joe Willie Wilkins or perhaps Willie Johnson, two Delta guitarists with backgrounds similar to his who began recording in Memphis a few years later. And he was singing strongly, letting his Delta pronunciations of words like “gypsaay” come out naturally, varying his timbre and playing with pitches to suggest subtle shadings of emotion and meaning. The lyrics were probably inspired by the gypsy fortune-telling salons of Chicago’s Maxwell Street area and should have been perfect for the black blues audience of the period. But Leonard Chess didn’t think much of the record. He let it sit on the shelf for several months before he released it and apparently didn’t push it even then.

  Then, early in 1948, Aristocrat called Muddy in to do another session… At the rehearsal that immediately preceded it, Muddy ran through his repertoire. This time, having failed twice in his attempts at contemporary urban blues, he brought his bottleneck and tried some of his old Delta numbers, including several he’d recorded for the Library of Congress. “What’s he singing? I can’t understand what he’s singing,” Chess reportedly protested…

  Despite Chess’ skepticism, Muddy recorded “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home.” On a Saturday morning in April 1948, copies of the record went out to Aristocrat’s South Side outlets, which included barber and beauty shops, variety stores, and other “mom and dad” businesses, as well as a few record shops. A little more than twelve hours later, the initial pressing was sold out.

  The next morning Muddy got up early and went right over to the Maxwell Radio Record Company. The crowded, chaotic little shop was run by one-eyed Bernard Abrams, another of Maxwell Street’s Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Abrams had primitive recording equipment in the back and had made acetates for a number of Maxwell Street blues performers. Muddy had played in front of the store in 1947 to help advertise the release of one of two discs Abrams put out in a brief and discouraging attempt to enter the record business, “I Just Keep Loving Her” and “Ora Nelle Blues” by harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs and guitarist Othum Brown. Muddy had been playing with Little Walter off and on for a few years but says he “kind of bypassed around Walter for a white ‘cause he had a bad, mean temper, always stayed in fights.” He didn’t hang around Maxwell Street much, either, but this Sunday morning he wanted a couple of copies of a certain record—his record. The crafty Abrams had stockpiled a few and was selling them for $1.10 each, one to a customer (list price was 79 cents). Muddy complained that it was his name on the label, but Abrams adamantly refused to sell him more than one copy or lower the price. Disgusted, Muddy took the one record, went home, and sent Annie Mae over for another one.

  Leonard Chess was caught off guard by the success of “I Can’t Be Satisfied”/”I Feel Like Going Home,” but, like any good businessman, he knew a good thing when he saw it. More copies were rapidly pressed, and soon the disc was selling steadily in Chicago and throughout the South. “I had a hot blues out, man,” Muddy says, still feeling cocky about it after all these years. “I’d be driving my truck, and whenever I’d see a neon beer sign, I’d stop, go in, look at the jukebox, and see is my record on there. I might buy me a beer and play the record and then leave. Don’t tell nobody nothing. Before long, every blues joint there was, that record was on the jukebox. And if you come in and sat there for a little while, if anybody was in there, they gonna punch it. Pretty soon I’d hear it walking along the street. I’d hear it driving along the street. About June or July that record was getting really hot. I would be driving home from playing, two or three o’clock in the morning, and I had a convertible, with the top back ‘cause it was warm. I could hear people all upstairs playing that record. It would be rolling up there, man. I heard it all over. One time I heard it coming from way upstairs somewhere, and it scared me. I thought I had died.”

  “Man, I’m Jewish, you know, I’ve been Jewish for years. Hell, man, I’m no Son House. I have not been pissed on, stepped on, shit on. But [Paul] Butterfield’s something else. There’s no white bullshit with him. It wouldn’t matter if he was green If he was a planaria, a tuna fish sandwich, Butterfield would still be into the blues.”—Michael Bloomfield

  MEMPHIS MINNIE AND THE CUTTING CONTEST BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  Before It’s Showtime at the Apollo, before American Idol, and long before Eminem faced off against rival rappers in Detroit, blues musicians used to battle each other in what were called “cutting contests.” The way Big Bill Broonzy tells it in his autobiography, June 26, 1933—his fortieth birthday—marked the day that he and Memphis Minnie, who’d moved to Chicago in 1930, engaged in what he described as “the first contest between blues singers that was ever given in the U.S.A.” The night Big Bill took on Memphis Minnie may have been the most celebrated cutting contest of them all.

  The tale begins in a Chicago club. It was a good night for the blues: The hall was packed with blues fans, there was lots of booze on hand, and there were plenty of musicians in attendance to drink that booze, including Big Bill and Memphis Minnie. Bill and Minnie had a long history together: They had played many of the same joints, they knew many of the same people. For a while, according to Big Bill, there was some other woman going around Chicago calling herself Memphis Minnie. When Big Bill ran into the imposter, he let her have it, saying, “Hell, no, that’s not Memphis Minnie, because the real Memphis Minnie can pick a guitar and sing as good as any man I’ve ever heard. This woman plays like a woman guitar player.”

  Big Bill had plenty of respect for Minnie. So, on that June night in that Chicago club, when a cutting contest was proposed, Big Bill got a little worried about squaring off against Memphis Minnie. The prize: a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin. The crowd began to buzz: a woman versus a man? Of course Big Bill was going to win! One patron came up to the bluesman and told him that he was sure he was going to come out on top. “I don’t know about that,” Big Bill told the man. “But I’m gonna try to win those two bottles so I can get in a corner and drink until I get enough.”

  The judges were picked: Sleepy John Estes, Tampa Red, and Richard Jones. The bottle of gin and the bottle of whiskey were ready. Other musicians wrapped up their sets, and at 1:30 a.m. the cutting contest was set to start.

  A couple things people should know about Memphis Minnie: She wasn’t bom in Memphis, and her real name wasn’t Minnie. Her given name was Lizzie Douglas, and she was born in Algiers, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, on June 3, 1897. She was the eldest of thirteen children, but from an early age she was a standout. When she was eight, her father bought her a guitar for Christmas, and she quickly learned how to play it. The rest of the Douglas family worked the fields as sharecroppers, but young Lizzie—everyone called her Kid at that time—didn’t much care for that sort of labor so, when she was thirteen years old, she left home, taking the guitar with her. And of course, she headed straight to Memphis. Beale Street, to be exact.

  People nowadays tend to think of the blues as something tragic, something downbeat, a kind of music that drapes around you and weighs you down like a wet overcoat. Those weren’t the kind of blues that Memphis Minnie played and those weren’t the kind of blues that she lived. Memphis Minnie’s blues were red hot. Around 1916, she hooked up with the Ringling Brothers circus and toured the South. When she would play her guitar for the crowds, she would stand up on a chair, lay her guitar across her head, and play her music any which way she could to get a response. Men who knew her also understood she was just as rambunctious in her personal life. In the biography Woman With Guitar: Memphis
Minnie’s Blues by Paul and Beth Garon, one musician, Johnny Shines, recalled, “Any men that would fool with her she’d go for them right away. She didn’t take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocketknife, pistol, anything she’d get her hand on she’d use it.” Her friend Homesick James had this to say about her: “That woman was tougher than a man. No man was strong enough to mess around with her.”

  Memphis Minnie, circa 1946

  Any man who wanted to spend time with Memphis Minnie had to know how to play an instrument. She had three husbands during her lifetime, and each of them was a musician. In 1929, a talent scout spotted her and her second husband, Joe McCoy, playing for dimes on Beale Street and invited them to record. The record company renamed them Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, and she began churning out the hits, including such songs as “When the Levee Breaks” and “Bumble Bee.” Her voice was full of fun, loaded with sex, and charged with smarts; her guitar playing was adept and vibrant and seemed to make melodies jump around in the ear. Lots of folks played the guitar, but Memphis Minnie could make you believe that her instrument was at play, that it was a living thing, and that it was having as good a time as you were. Said Big Bill, “Memphis Minnie can make a guitar speak words, she can make a guitar cry, moan, talk, and whistle the blues.”