Topic: 1950's electric blues fans?

[Bunker Hill]

A real must for any fans of Muddy is Robert Gordon's book "Can't Be Satisfied: The Life & Times Of Muddy Waters" (Little Brown & Co, 2002) - a well researched and written account. Not that long ago the paperback edition was being sold off cheap by UK book dealers which I guess might indicate that it's now out of print over here.

Here is a review that appeared in Blues & Rhythm:

For satisfied readers of 'It Came From Memphis', the news that Robert Gordon was going to gather his thoughts on the subject of Muddy Waters' life and times was greeted with happy expectation. In his Foreword to 'Memphis', Peter Guralnick reckoned Gordon 'is possessed by an imaginative grasp of history' and the proof is that in his writing history is part of the tale rather than being tacked on as an afterthought.
  Until his last years, Muddy was circumspect in interviews about his life and opinions, and this reticence was interpreted as a kind of personal dignity when in reality it was a combination of justified self-belief and an awareness of his inability to adequately express himself. Like Wolf, he was acutely embarrassed by his lack of education but unlike Wolf he did little about it, retreating instead behind a facade of good-natured but distant bonhomie. His biography must therefore rely on a large amount of outside input and a degree or two of intuition.
  In his 'General Reading Suggestions', Gordon summarily dismisses Sandra Tooze's previous effort for using 'an extended Muddy discography as its foundation, tracing his life through his recordings'. That's perhaps unfair, given the extensive interview work that went into it, but a penchant for idolatrous words like 'icon' and 'colossus' and a reference to Muddy's cabin as a 'sacred shrine' in its early pages sets the tone for her book. Tooze's Muddy remains a one-dimensional figure, an idealised portrait that evinces little effort to probe the blemishes that made up the whole man.
  Not so Gordon, who tempers his admiration with a salutary number of unpleasant revelations about Muddy's sedulous and unbridled libido. Where Tooze makes brief acknowledgement and moves on to more praiseworthy matters, Gordon lingers long enough to illuminate his subject's peccadilloes and their consequences without undermining the achievements that stemmed from the same imperative urges. In his view, the one is inseparable from the other. Muddy Waters is revealed as a flawed man who nevertheless achieved true greatness as a musician and as the architect of a style that had a direct bearing on more than just Chicago blues.
  Gordon's larger vision is evident in his introduction, in which he contrasts the fact that Muddy's Stovall cabin has been preserved and presented around America - a crass example of what he calls 'the commodification of the blues' - whereas the Chicago home where he lived while he made a series of historic records, achieved a sort of stardom and transformed the blues is now derelict. And a thought coalesces, one that could serve as a metaphor for the story he's about to tell: 'It is easy to put Muddy in that cabin, easy to relocate him and his rural beginnings around the world, a neat stitch in the American quilt - picturesque and just the right colors. But easy doesn't make it so.'
  The surprises begin early. Within two pages,Muddy is described as 'a man born in a year he wasn't born in, from a town where he wasn't born, carrying a name he wasn't born with'. That follows the revelation that he was born at a bend in the road called Jug's Corner, alongside the Cottonwood Plantation in the next county over from Rolling Fork, and that the date was April 4, 1913. To corroborate this, a page of John Work's original field notes is reproduced in which the year 1913 is prominently displayed. Much to Alan Lomax's imminent confusion, Gordon has discovered Work's original manuscript pertaining to the 1941/2 field recording trips, including 158 song transcriptions (including lost recordings by Muddy) and a treatise ten chapters long. It has languished undocumented at Fisk University for almost sixty years; a copy went to the Library of Congress but perhaps someone there had no wish to find it.
  The story of Muddy's early years has been well rehearsed but the author has turned up a few new witnesses to Muddy's life on Stovall. Add to that an easy writing style with a felicitous turn of phrase: when Muddy first encounters Son House, the latter is described as 'a hammer of a man', a phrase that puts mealy-mouthed vindictives like Stephen Calt in their place. Muddy was getting into other things, as well. His friend Myles Long (later the Reverend, etc.) noted, 'You got to keep your head when it comes to women and whiskey. Muddy, he wasn't so bad at whiskey, it was the women. The women messed him up.' Muddy married Mary Berry when he was nineteen but he was already running around on her. Cousin Elve Morganfield made the point: 'Muddy loved women. Just like any other man, you supposed to love a woman. But you ain't supposed to try to have all of 'em.'
  From now on, Muddy's inability (or downright refusal) to put a restraining collar on his trouser snake will continue to slither through the manuscript but not at the expense of the story to be told. Within three years, Mabel left her husband, prompted no doubt by the birth of his first child, a daughter Azelene, born to Leola Spain, herself already married and with another boyfriend. Cousin Elve: 'It gets complicated.' Nevertheless, Muddy never lost touch with Leola, his daughter and his grandchildren. They became part of his extended family, most of whom benefitted from the largesse he was able to divide among them.
  Chapter Three is devoted to the first LoC recordings and Gordon is punctilious in emphasising John Work's major role in the sessions. Originally mooted as a trip to Natchez to discover a year on the consequences of the death of the Walter Barnes band and patrons of the Rhythm Night Club, the eventual destination became the Clarksdale area. Despite Work's crucial importance to the project, in Mississippi he had to take a back seat to Lomax's paternalistic lead. At chapter's end, Gordon quotes from Lomax's The Land Where The Blues Began and from Work's manuscript and notes the similarities. Work's name appears only once in the former text and, as Gordon states, 'Lomax virtually erased the scholarship of John Work. Far more troubling . . . is Lomax's refusal to acknowledge the contributions of others, especially of an African American whose ideas, research and knowledge were pivotal to his own achievements.' Surely this can't be the man who so generously added himself to the composer credits for Leadbelly's 'Goodnight Irene'?
  The story moves on to Chicago and Muddy's assimilation into the music scene and the gradual accrual of a group of musicians around him. Again, the turn of phrase delights: '(Little) Walter was a cat what liked a hat. Crisp suits, snappy shirts, he dressed like cash money, or the lack thereof;: one day chicken, the next day feathers.' And of course, there's the women. Initially, it's Annie Mae Anderson (commemorated at the first Aristocrat session) and probably there were others before Geneva Wade came into his life; she became a Morganfield but the bond was never solemnised. The momentum of Muddy's recordings increases as his band style moves further away from its Mississippi inspiration. As one witness reports, 'When they were going to play the blues, most of the guys said, We're going to play the Muddy Waters blues.' As Gordon simply states, Muddy 'was becoming his own genre'.
  The success of 'Mad Love' and 'Hoochie Coochie Man' allowed him to move from the West to the South Side. The House on South Lake Park became not just his home but that of Otis Spann, 'Bo' Bolton, uncle Joe Grant and Geneva's two sons, Charles and Dennis. Future tenants would include St. Louis Jimmy Oden. Leola Spain and her daughter Azelene moved in nearby. With the help of new recruit Jimmy Cotton, the narrative goes on the road with the band, recounting some of the shenanigans that ensued, including a drunken night in Tuscaloosa when Muddy took a hotel maid to his room, accused her of stealing and started beating her with a bucket. The whole band went to jail.
  Back in Chicago, the string of Muddy's outside women continued unwinding; there was Mildred with whom he sired another son and Dorothy, who was given an apartment. When she got two-timed she turned up at Ruby's Show Lounge and the two began to fight. Muddy paid the jail another brief visit and Dorothy broke all the windows in the band's station wagon. The Chicago Defender ran a photograph and Muddy tried to prevent Geneva from seeing it. A little old lady came to Muddy's door and gave Geneva a copy, saying 'I just want to show you what a rotten motherfucker you got'.
  And so the story goes. As the Sixties progress into the Seventies, Gordon draws back from an endless list of records made and gigs played to present some of the chaotic circumstances that resulted from Muddy's one-eyed view of his world. Girlfriends come and go, children proliferate. Meanwhile, his recording career falters with nonsense like 'Muddy Waters Twist'; 'There is no Mississippi in the song, there is no Chicago.' Then there's Muddy, Brass & The Blues and brass is emphatically not what Muddy is about. But that's as nothing compared to Electric Mud and After The Rain, the brainchildren of Leonard Chess's son Marshall, that each shipped gold and returned platinum.
  Leonard Chess dies (as does Geneva) and Chess Records is sold but not before Muddy puts his mark to some dubious paperwork that appropriates his copyrights with a pitifully small financial carrot. Then Johnny Winter turns up and with Grammy-winning records and honest management, Muddy enjoys his declining years with the appurtenances of modest wealth. In his later tours, he brought his children onstage to sing along with 'Got My Mojo Working'. But other members of the family weren't so happy when they realised the number of their siblings. 'When I was younger, he was a god to me,' Azelene's daughter Cookie Cooper admits. 'As I have gotten older, and dealt with things, I will always be grateful for the things he did in my life, but as a person, he was not a very nice person.'
  The author rounds out the story in his fifteenth chapter, charting the family's fortunes since their father's death. And he assesses Muddy's impact on his century: '. . . Muddy's achievement is the triumph of the dirt farmer. His music brought respect to a culture dismissed as offal. His music spawned the triumphant voice of angry people demanding change. This dirt has meaning.'
  Robert Gordon has produced an immensely readable biography, as rowdy and dangerous as its subject. Even though much of what is documented is familiar, the imperative to keep reading never slackens and it's uncluttered by reference notes. These are contained in 74 pages at the end of the manuscript. Each chapter is prefaced by a page or more of background which teems with information before the annotation of the sources for each note. Apart from taking quotes from others' interviews with Muddy, he also questioned some 80 interviewees of his own. The detail in these notes would have impeded the narrative; it's almost like reading a second biography and it's a necessary exercise.
  It's not faultless, though. He misquotes the lyrics to 'Rollin' Stone', neither take makes reference to Rolling Fork, as he does. He also reckons Bristol is a suburb of London but perhaps to a Memphian that might seem the case. He's also addicted to an American abbreviation that refers to 'a couple times', 'a couple records', 'a couple days' - except on page 266, where a paragraph begins, 'A couple of weeks later,'. At least he doesn't start any of his sentences with 'Too, . . .' Well, you have to find something to complain about. But no one will complain at the excellent job Robert Gordon's done. There'll be no need for another Muddy Waters biography, this will do handsomely. NEIL SLAVEN

[Bunker Hill]

Check out Collector's Classic Muddy Waters and Friends, Goin' Back, Just Memory JAM 9130-2.  It is acoustic and for that reason is atypical of the his work of the period.  It is core Mud though and a treat to hear.

I own this and would concur. It was recorded in Quebec in 1967 by Michael Nerenberg and quite "informal", a telephone rings off-mike during one of the songs. Oh yes, Otis Spann accompanies himself on guitar for two songs - which he also did at a couple of London club gigs the following year. But I'm rambling...

[CF]

Woohoo, lay it on us Bunker, thanks a lot for that extended review, I'm salivating . . .
I have the Tooze bio & agree that it lacks a depth I was hoping to find.
The Gordon book sounds like a must have to me.
MJH1928 altho' I agree Muddy hit a kind of lame streak there a while in the 60s, everything else he did is essential, in my opinion.
Funny thing: I love the plantation recordings but they start out so powerful & then it sounds like Muddy was running out of ideas by the end, like he could have been an interesting footnote to the Blues & not much else. Thank god that wasn't that case at all.

[mississippijohnhurt1928]

Calvin -
Don't give up on Muddy. Listen to anything from the late 40s thru all of the 1950's. Some cuts will be just Muddy and an upright, others will have
a great collection of sidemen (Little Walter and many more).
If I had tp pick one blues performer as an example of all that is powerful in the blues (Singing,Playing and writing) it would be Muddy...hands down.

I listened to The Chess Box, I listened to some live album, Breakin' It Up Breakin' it Down, Etc.

And I just don't like him.

[dave stott]

oh man, this posting has got me itching to pull out my Little Walter, Chess collection LP's and my old Muddy Waters LP's, especially my Chess box set (CH6-80002 set of his recordings...

Nothing beats chillin to the sound of Little Walter blowing the heck out of that harp!!!

Little Walter was unbeleivable


Dave

[RobBob]

I have been teaching a continuing education course on the music of Muddy Waters.  The theme for this course changes each semester.  Last night we listened to and discussed Muddy's sidemen.  Little Walter of course got a lot of play as did Otis Spann,  Jimmy Rogers, Jr. Wells, Jimmy Cotton and George Harmonica Smith.  I played a couple of cuts off of Smith's tribute to Little Walter lp from 1968 on Pacific Jazz with the Muddy Waters band.  Smith gets it with his take on Walter's stuff.

I also played what I consider Walter's greatest break on Jimmy Roger's "Walkin By My Self".  The power and expressive dynamics of that wildly careening solo is almost out of control.

What my students don't always get is that there is a direct lineage between these 50's cuts and the acoustic band cuts of twenty years earlier.  Take Jr. Wells cover of Sonny Boy one's "Early in the Morning".  The bands differ but the treatment of the song is essentially the same.  Or Spann singing some old blues with just his piano could have been recorded about the time he was born, 1930.  Why?  Probably because they learned as much from recordings as by being around the older players.

Call me old, but I love those blues that remind me of when I was a kid.

Rob

[Pan]

I hope I'm forgiven, if I stray away from the 50's to the late 60's, but since Little Walter is mentioned, I thought I'd post these two videos, just in case someone hasn't noticed them:

Here's Little Walter with Hound Dog Taylor:



Koko Taylor added to the personnel:



Cheers

Pan

[Bunker Hill]

Take Jr. Wells cover of Sonny Boy one's "Early in the Morning".  The bands differ but the treatment of the song is essentially the same. 

Indeed so. Boring nerd that I am would also draw attention to the fact that the first title Junior recorded for States (8 June 1953) was the very last that John Lee Williamson cut for Victor (12 November 1947) - [You Better] Cut That Out.

[Bunker Hill]

BH - Yes, the Robert Gordon Muddy bio is a must read, I'd also recommend Chicago Blues:The City and the Music by Mike Rowe (first published as Chicago Breakdown in 1973). After 30 years I still find this book filled with useful info, written with the passion of a loving fan.

Over the decades various commentators have made the point that this work seems to stood the test of time (and stayed in print) because it is essentially concerned with timeless topics such as migration, record business, labels, owners, artists, clubs encapsulated in a very specific time period. The following is from a jazz mag (Into Jazz Magazine April 1974, p. 38) and is marginally more objective than those which appeared in the blues press of the time:

Chicago Breakdown by Mike Rowe
Eddison Press, 228 pages, illustrated, ?2.50

If anyone was going to write a book specifically about the blues of Chicago, it surely had to be Mike Rowe. Most people who have followed his writings over the past ten years or so (mainly in Blues Unlimited) would have been hoping one day for some such focal point of his research. Well, it has arrived in the form of Chicago Breakdown, a concise study of the development of what was primarily a rural music in the urban environment of Chicago.

What an apt title! It is not only the name of a blues number, but it also signifies a breakdown of available information into a unified whole. It also implies the eventual deterioration of the Chicago blues as a strong regional style, its general assimilation into other musical styles, and its gradual envelopment by them ? the Decline and Fall as Chapter Nine in the book is headed.

Any criticism of such a work would be carping and subjective. Mike Rowe has tried to be as objective in his viewpoint as possible, although when dealing with such a personal music as the blues, it is not always easy to escape subjectivity.

What really sells the book at first are the excellent photographs. You can rarely turn over a page without seeing an illustration of some kind ? a label, a poster, a death certificate, or more usually a relevant picture of the artist and/or period under discussion. A good percentage of these are surely appearing in print for the first time.

As appendices, there is a map showing Chicago Clubs in the Fifties (find out just where Smitty's Corner, the Copa Cobana and Pepper's were), a list of Chicago R&B Hits 1945-59 and a list of important records.

The R&B Hit listings tell the story of Chicago blues very basically. From Big Boy Crudup's three hits in 1945-6 through Muddy's first in 1951 Lousiana Blues, the Chess/Checker dominated years of the early fifties, to the first Jimmy Reed hit (1955). Then 1956 ? a bumper year, but one that saw the ever increasing presence of names such as the Flamingoes, Chuck Berry, and the Moonglows. In the end the blues had virtually disappeared from the charts, with only the surprisingly consistent commercial success of Jimmy Reed representing the down-home sound (Baby What You Want Me To Do in 1960 and Bright Lights Big City in 1961). The last actual blues hit was Koko Taylor's version of Wang Dang Doodle (1966).

The text of the book follows the same pattern, on the whole. But there are 15 pages on The Pre-War Blues with relevant emphasis on Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson and the musicians mainly involved on Bluebird sessions. This is followed by 14 pages of sociology - 'From Farm to Factory'. This is important to a complete understanding of the nature of Chicago blues, and the coldness of the statistics is again relieved by photographs.

From then on it's a straight forward account of the post-war scene, centred mainly of course around the operations of the Chess brothers, but dealing also with the many smaller labels that were so prevalent.

A criticism has already been levelled elsewhere that there are too many facts in too little space. One does indeed miss that certain descriptive enthusiasm of, say, a Samuel Charters. But these are hard times, and Mike would no doubt have liked to have written twice as much as he did. In any case, there are more than enough verbal illustrations from the men who made the music to add living colour to the names and labels.

My own subjective criticisms concern my own attitudes to the music. For instance, unlike Mike Rowe, I enjoy some of the songs that St. Louis Jimmy wrote for Muddy. Despite an admitted sameness, records like Woman Wanted and I Am Your Doctor  were still exciting and vital sounds of the times. Mike Rowe also has little time for the 'thunderous amplification of Muddy's earlier Little Geneva and Canary Bird. I happen to think these two tracks extremely exciting (and possibly influential). However, we are all bound to find chances to pick holes in the book ?as I said before, the blues is a personal music, perhaps even more so than Jazz.

But if you have ever been moved by Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Little Walter, Elmore James, Rice Miller, Otis Rush, Otis Spann, Jimmy Reed, Howlin Wolf, or Junior Wells (to name the best known) you'll find plenty to interest you in this book.   Dave Illingworth

[unezrider]

hello friends,
bunker that is some great info! i had the book in my hand several years ago, but never bought it. sometimes bios can come off as uninteresting to me. but i'll have to see if i can't find it here, in the near future.
and not to harp on calvin, but i agree w/ everything spikedriver said about muddy. i have found in my own experience, anyway, sometimes you have to go to the music when you're ready for it. it may not come to you. when i first started listening to muddy, for example, i was drawn to his earliest stuff on chess. i didn't care as much for the full band recordings from '54 onward. but i kept them around, & within the next couple of years, a song or two at a time, '54-'60(or so) became my favorite muddy material - & still is.
don't try to force it if it's not there, but give it a few years, as has already been said by others.
chris

[outfidel]

These just missed making it out in the '50s, but Otis Rush's "All My Love" and "So Many Roads", from January of 1960, are wonderful cuts.  What a great singer and player!

Amen!

I'm a big fan of the big 3 West Side gunslingers -- Otis Rush, Magic Sam & Buddy Guy -- love the Cobra recordings from those cats:

[CF]

This is reminding me . . . when I was first getting into the blues & was listening to Rob Johnson, Leadbelly, MS John Hurt & etc. my cousin & friend were constantly listening to the famous Chess 'Best of Muddy Waters', black cover album & I didn't think much of it at the time. Man, hard to believe! I think I was slow to warm up to the Chicago electrified sound. I agree, you have to be ready for Muddy, not that he's for everybody, but . . .  well, yes he is

[Rivers]

Great vids guys!

I'd just like to say I finally understood Muddy's place in music when, through reading rather than listening, I realized Muddy actually started the whole Chicago electric blues era. When you try to imagine what was going down in the hiatus before Muddy's first electric bands you get some idea of how he lit the fire. When you understand that you listen with whole new ears.

[dj]

Thanks for posting those videos, Pan!

According to Blues With A Feeling: The Little Walter Story by Tony Glover, Scott Dirks, and Ward Gaines, the videos must have been recorded during an October 1967 American Folk-Blues Festival tour of Europe - not sure exactly when, as they were taped for TV several times during the tour.  That's Dillard Crume on bass and Odie Payne on drums.

[blueshome]

I've just caught up with this thread.
At risk of pedantry, Robob, it was Walter Horton on Jimmy Rogers' "Walkin".
This solo is only surpassed by Big Walter's work on JOB with Johnny Shines where they are both at the top of their game - just listen to "Evening Sun" for how to build tension and excitment..