Can't Be Satisfied (28 page)

The Broonzy album was recorded over two sessions in the summer of 1959. Francis Clay drummed on the first one; the second session introduced drummer Willie Smith, who would soon occupy the
drummer’s chair, staying for the better part of twenty years. “When I was little I used to dig Big Bill’s stuff,” said Smith. “Them was blues at that time.”
Issued early the following year, the album features a relatively unexciting batch of songs. The hard edges and angularity of Muddy’s best work are replaced by an approachable, somewhat
superficial, blues style.
Billboard
didn’t mind: “A fortunate coupling —
Broonzy’s material interpreted by Muddy. Blues fans will find this
hard to put down.”

And it seemed like after his trip overseas, there was a turn of Muddy’s fortunes. Chuck Berry was indicted in 1959 under the Mann Act for transporting a fourteen-year-old Apache Indian
girl across state lines for immoral purposes; before his trial, he was indicted again on a similar incident. Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin and fell from grace, and Little
Richard left rock and roll for the grace of gospel. Rock suffered another major blow with the airplane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Payola became national
news, and suddenly Alan Freed was not the man he used to be.

While rock and roll seemed to be nosediving, blues was getting a boost. Sam Charters published his book
The Country Blues,
pointing the way for the blues revival that would sweep the
1960s. This trend was further foretold by the trickle of European visitors and American whites who began dotting the South Side clubs. Muddy and Leonard were surely not done trying.

When Chess producer Jack Tracy introduced Muddy to Nesuhi Ertegun at Smitty’s at the end of the 1950s, the bluesman probably assumed the Turk another foreign fan. But Ertegun was a
principal at Atlantic Records and had a lot of power in the music world. The meeting was casual but the music was extraordinary. Ertegun went back to New York and soon an invitation came from the
coast that would propel Muddy to white America.

Meanwhile, the increasing numbers of whites — Americans and Europeans — who wanted Muddy’s company intimidated him. “Muddy was scared to talk to them, so he sent
me,” said Clay. “I started telling him what to say. When writers would come in, he’d walk down off the stage and say [adopting a formal tone], ‘Good evening, I’m Muddy
Waters, welcome to Smitty’s Corner.’ He got it down fast, he delighted in it.” Cotton remembered one night at Smitty’s Corner when “in walks Paul Butterfield, Nick
Gravenites, and Elvin Bishop. Muddy Waters thought they was the tax people. He owed some taxes, said, ‘Goddamn, they’ve come to get me. That’s
got to be
them.’ Muddy hid in the office between sets.” The three were not from the IRS; they were budding white blues musicians.

The writers, the musicians — Muddy realized that white America was on his tail. Before the decade’s end, Elvis had recorded a song called “Trouble” in his film
King
Creole,
and its striptease beat was very reminiscent of “Hoochie Coochie Man.” “I thought,” said Muddy, “I better watch out. I believe whitey’s
pickin’ up on things that I’m doin’.”

He was right.

M
uddy’s tour of England laid the groundwork for the second half of his career, when he became the godfather of rock and roll and an icon for
white audiences. His impact on the youth — electrified by his power and sensuality — sowed the seeds of the British Invasion, when rock and roll bands would remind America of its
indigenous music.

But that would all be somewhat indirect. The terms of Muddy’s personal acquaintance with white America were established at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1960. He played raucous, hard-grinding
Chicago blues, his band like a tractor driving up a hill. When Bob Dylan would play similar music at the Newport Folk Festival half a decade later, the audience would boo. Such a ruckus was
unacceptable to budding hippies and committed folkies in white New England when it came from one of their own. But Muddy didn’t read Dylan Thomas or attend college; he shared neither this
audience’s background nor their foreground. He dropped in on the folk scene like a museum exhibit from the wild — jungle music authenticated by jungle men. In case of emergency, break
this glass. Muddy shattered it.

The blues program was held Sunday afternoon, July third. The day before, more people than the venue could hold wanted to see Ray Charles and the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. It was
summer and hot, and about 300 tipsy jazz fans realized that only a handful of cops separated them from swinging with Ray. So they rushed the cops, who pulled out tear gas and water hoses, and such
a melee ensued that by midnight there were three companies of National Guardsmen on the streets.

Muddy’s entourage saw the lingering mayhem as they arrived Sunday morning. They’d driven from Chicago the night before and would return the next day; a
2,000-mile one-night stand. James Cotton pulled the station wagon over when he saw John Lee Hooker standing on a corner, his guitar slung over his shoulder, no case. “You better get in
here,” he said, and they all drove to backstage safety.

The town’s council, more comfortable with millions of dollars than thousands of marauding music fans, decided to terminate the annual party. George Wein, the event’s promoter,
quickly undertook negotiations. Arrangements had already been made with the United States Information Agency to film the Sunday show for promoting American culture overseas. The council recognized
their patriotic duty, and as a compromise agreed that the blues program — but no other events — could go forward.

Before Muddy played, his band backed Spann, who stepped out as leader, and also backed John Lee Hooker. Around 5
P.M.
, Muddy strode to center stage. His band wore formal
white attire, he wore black. Standing erect, keenly aware how distant his South Side joints were, and how white this audience was, and how large, Muddy was solemn as he introduced his first number
— recorded only a month previously, not yet released, and thus completely unfamiliar to the audience: “I Got My Brand on You.”

By the end of the next one, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” these songs about sex and fun were hitting home. No one (but the band) minded when he forgot the words to “Tiger in Your
Tank”; vamping with the title only drove home the image. These squealing record buyers were riding right with him when, using the colloquial names of the male and female mule, he sang in the
hip-shaking “I Feel So Good”: “I feel like a jack on a jenny / way over behind the hill.”

They went absolutely nuts for “Mojo,” clapping along and dancing to the best of their ability. Muddy, by this point, was completely comfortable, thrusting his hips and grinding as if
he were on a familiar Chicago stage. “Lay it on me,” he told the band, and Cotton led them in a shuffling good-time breakdown that would have made proud Lewis Ford, Muddy’s rowdy
levee-building partner from Stovall. Pat Hare’s guitar sound was the envy of all the young rockers.
Drummer Francis Clay, among his kind at this jazz festival,
embellished the rhythm; “Mojo” jumped as if newly mastered. “I wasn’t a hand to dance,” Muddy had told Lomax twenty years earlier, but during “Mojo” he
showed Elgin movements, skipping over to Cotton, whisking him off his feet and into a fox-trot, then breaking into a jitterbug that defies every rumor and legend about Muddy’s stoic stage
presence. Returning to the microphone, he repeatedly thrust his hips, emphasizing exactly to which mojo he was referring, and just how it worked. His authority was casual and majestic; the crowd
demanded a reprise. Muddy gave them “Mojo” again, hammering home four times, “Got my mojo working,” because it was, and it did.

At the day’s close, all the blues performers assembled on stage for a medley of blues standards, passing the lead vocal. The sight of these luminaries together, and the thought that
opportunities to recreate it at Newport were no more, so moved poet Langston Hughes, a member of the Newport Board of Directors, that he composed a poem on the spot, grabbing a Western Union blank
and writing on the back of it. He handed “Good-bye Newport Blues” to Spann, who could read, and Spann, sharing the feeling, quickly returned to the stage, joined by most of
Muddy’s band. Too drained, Muddy remained backstage; Spann sang lead, performing the poem as if he’d learned it from Friday Ford back in Belzoni. “It’s a gloomy day in
Newport,” Spann sang, and in the next verse asked, “What’s going to happen to my music?”

The answer to Hughes’s lament is ironic. Muddy’s set, filmed by the USIA, was released as a live album. “Got My Mojo Working” was nominated for a 1960 Grammy Award in the
category “Best Rhythm and Blues Performance.” In England, “Tiger in Your Tank” and “I Got My Brand on You” were promptly snatched up by Alexis Korner’s
Blues Incorporated. Spann’s Newport set was released on album in Europe, and he, who had recorded only four sides as bandleader, returned to New York the next month for a session backed by
Robert Lockwood Jr., initiating a side-career as bandleader. The successful marketing of Muddy’s appearance established Newport as a blues commerce center. And, after a two-year hiatus, the
festival resumed.

Muddy might have had an inkling of this success when, the previous September, 1959, two French blues fans, Jacques Demetre and Marcel Chauvard, introduced
themselves to Muddy on a Saturday night at Smitty’s Corner. “Muddy expressed his joy, shook our hands, and presented us to his band: ‘Hey fellows, look at these cats who’ve
come all the way from France to hear us. You’re going to have the time of your life.’ ” They recounted their experiences in a book titled
Land of the Blues.

After the gig, Muddy, concerned about their safety, insisted on driving the visitors back to their hotel. In the car, they inquired after blues singer Kokomo Arnold. Muddy had lost touch with
Kokomo, but not with his passion for early blues. In the crisp night air of autumn, urban Chicago rolling past the windshield, he broke into song, Kokomo’s “Milk Cow Blues.”

Upon their return to Europe, the Frenchmen paid a visit to Paul Oliver (who had written the program notes for Muddy’s UK tour) in England and inspired him to visit Chicago, which he did
the week after Newport, 1960. Muddy was “incredibly welcoming” and insisted Oliver and his wife stay at the house. “I couldn’t really believe that St. Louis Jimmy was
actually living in the basement of Muddy’s house,” remembered Oliver. “I went down, saw all the waste pipes and plumbing passing through, and Jimmy was curled up in the
corner.”

Equally amazing were Muddy’s other tenants: James Cotton was living upstairs with his wife and child, as was George “Mojo” Buford, who would soon join
the band; Spann was still in and out of the basement, and Bo was often there; Muddy’s uncle Joe Grant (which Oliver mistakenly heard as “Brant”) also lived downstairs. Cookie,
Muddy’s four-year-old granddaughter, had moved in a year earlier, and Geneva’s sons Charles and Dennis were part of the household.

“I was surprised how carefully the furniture was looked after,” said Oliver. “All the big settees, big armchairs, all covered in sheet plastic and fitted like a shirt, the
perfect suburban home. They didn’t want to bring the South but they weren’t really quite urban either. It was summer and, to keep the heat out, they kept all the curtains drawn and
hardly any lights on so it was difficult to see until the evening when they could throw them back. It made the place rather gloomy whereas the cellar was actually the brightest. It was painted a
curious lemon color.”

On nights off, the whole house shut down by nine, stirring again between five and six in the morning — farmer’s hours. Oliver stayed several days, keeping late hours at clubs and
conducting interviews from Muddy’s basement for his book
Conversation with the Blues.
“I think the thing that struck me most about Muddy,” he said, “was he spent
most of the time sleeping. He gave out so much when he was performing. He said to me once, ‘You’re not performing unless you’re sweating.’ . . . Muddy roared, leaped, jerked
in fierce and violent spasms. When he came off the stage he was in a state of near trance and the sweat poured off him.”

Little Walter was hanging out at Muddy’s gig, interrupting Oliver if he spoke too long to Muddy, and generally creating confusion. “Walter would call for another round of drink and
then the waiter would come up and Walter would say, ‘I didn’t ask for it,’ and look at me with his eyebrows raised,” Oliver recounted. “ ‘Did you see me ask for
that?’ He had been shot in the ankle and it was heavily bandaged. When I expressed some concern he ripped open his shirt and he was just covered in scars from knives and God knows what. He
courted disaster, I think he rejoiced in it.”