It’s been one hundred years since McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield came screaming and crying onto this Mississippi earth, poor and common as dirt, a future as dim and forlorn as one could imagine in a post-slavery “democracy”. Yet he made himself into an icon, a recording artist and performer whose work has transcended generations, whose art has translated across lands, and remains, decades after his death, powerful and exciting.
Blues music as we know it had yet to coalesce in 1913. The keening sounds of the slide guitar were beginning to proliferate, and the rhythms and elements that would become the blues were blowing across the delta like a storm, gathering strength and shape. Muddy’s maturity coincides with the codification of the blues, and what he took from Robert Johnson and Son House to make his own, stands today as a bedrock of modern music.
Even that foundation, however, has begun to shift. Through the second half of the twentieth century, all music seemed a response to what Muddy (and Sam Phillips in Memphis, and a few others throughout the region) created; if it wasn’t an imitation or variation, it was something like “industrial” music—a purposeful reaction to the roots. Now, in a world caught on the internet, international influences have expanded and machines—software versions of what once were called “synthesizers” and now can be played with the same lettered keys with which this introduction is being typed—make it easier to forge new sounds with new patterns. Blues remains a vital root, but the tree has grown, the expanse of branches shading new areas.
What world, what life and opportunities, would Muddy face if born in today’s Mississippi Delta? The poverty that once dominated the delta remains a prominent factor in daily life, though diluted by occasional industries—catfish farming, automobile manufacturing, Viking Ranges. Casino gambling has spread through the delta, giving employment to some, robbing most of both their meager wages and their hopes, fueling unemployment and thus also the youth gangs that maraud ever more freely. The odds for a life better than the minimal sustenance of sharecropping are probably better than they were, though that’s balanced by the depths of the new horrors: gangs, guns, methamphetamine and the disintegration of the village.
Muddy had an entrepreneurial drive and a desire to make his mark, but the gumption for hard won goals is so easily numbed nowadays in a culture that kills intentions and distinction with kindness and ease, that dilutes what’s original with the prefabricated, that paves with plastic the untrodden paths almost immediately upon their discovery.
A new industry is growing in the delta, and all across Mississippi, and it sheds a light of hope: Cultural tourism. The state that fought recognition of its dark-skinned citizens as even being human has come to embrace their culture. What once was despised is now embraced: The state sponsors the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of historical markers placed in urban and rural areas, in historical locations and on vacant lots, amid the urban bustle and away off in the middle of nowhere, all commemorating contributions to the blues, all heralding this fundamentally African-American expression. As well, there’s the B. B. King Museum, with hundreds of schoolchildren bussed in daily to see consecrated and praised the life of a poor dirt farmer, the pride as plain as the once-institutional efforts to keep him down; the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland, music festivals, home tours and shrines of all kinds, large and small. Some are privately funded, others bankrolled by taxpayers. The memorials and honors extend past music to the political heroes who were gunned down, to the Freedom Riders, to anonymous street protestors and to members of international communities who helped shape the delta—Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, Italian, Mexican, Native American. The past in Mississippi is being confronted, and it’s not being whitewashed.
The Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Muddy Waters song, recently charged over $800 for a single evening’s ticket (that’s official prices, not scalpers)—a sum Muddy would have loved to have earned for a whole year’s backbreaking labor working dawn to dusk in the cotton fields. B. B. King doesn’t charge as much as the Stones, but his success indicates the continuation of the recognition and honor Muddy received in his lifetime.
Bluesmen and blues women, blues songs and blues fans—they continue to be born every day. Their provenance is no longer restricted to a geographical area nor the result of immediate environment. And the reason for this enduring life of the blues is the same as it ever was: honesty. Blues tells fundamental truths, sings of hard times and hope, relieves burdens and celebrates a brighter tomorrow (actually, a brighter tonight). The blues, in an uneven, lovely exchange, is nourished by the chaos and unhappiness in life, and in turn provides us with a poetry and the courage to continue.
A bit of shopkeeping: the 1940 census, released since this book’s initial publication, further affirms Muddy’s birth year as 1913. The census is certainly not infallible, but it is interesting to see the early information revealed.
Also new since original publication are a related book and documentary. I was taken by the John Work and Alan Lomax research trips, and with Bruce Nemerov I published my findings in a Vander-bilt University Press book, Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941–1942. This book includes the previously unpublished original research papers by the three African-American scholars so often overlooked: John Work, Lewis Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. As well, I made a documentary, Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied, which features great on-screen interviews and some astounding Muddy Waters performances. I hope both of these, along with the reissuing of this biography, will introduce Muddy and the blues to new fans and will also enrich the understanding of those who’ve been lost in this groove before. It’s a tough world, and the blues helps us through it.
– Robert Gordon, Memphis, Tennessee
January, 2013