I was thinking to myself that I could do better in a big city,” Muddy recollected to writer and friend Pete Welding in 1970. “I thought I could make more money, and then I would have more opportunities to get into the big record field.”
The only big city on Muddy’s mind was Chicago. Its presence in the Delta was long established. That which did not come from the ground or the furnish came from Chicago, usually through the catalogs of Sears and Montgomery Ward. Since 1916, the city’s black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, had been promoting what it called “The Great Northern Drive”: “Every black man for the sake of his wife and daughter should leave even at a financial sacrifice every spot in the South where his worth is not appreciated enough to give him the standing of a man and a citizen in the community. We know full well that this would almost mean a depopulation of that section and if it were possible we would glory in its accomplishment.” By 1930, the largest population of Mississippians outside the state was in Chicago. And as America’s entrance into World War II rekindled the industrial fires of the northern factories, the need for soldiers created a manpower crisis. Of the African Americans who went north in the first half of the century, nearly half migrated between 1940 and 1947. By the end of the forties, the median annual wage for blacks in Chicago was $1,919, while in the Magnolia state of Mississippi it was $439. Field hands took work on the assembly line at the Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Illinois, making money by making the machines that had taken their work.
“I went straight to Chicago, didn’t travel around at all,” said Muddy. “I went by train from Clarksdale to Memphis, changed in Memphis, and came up on the train they call Chicago Nine.” In 1940, Memphis to Chicago on the Illinois Central was a sixteen-hour trip costing eleven dollars and ten cents. If Muddy’s recording payment was socked away, he could have traveled north on it, with money left to spend.
Small towns dotted the line between Memphis and Chicago, the view from the train window mostly of farmland. The continuity of the landscape would reassure apprehensive travelers, the familiar topography soothing the first and most violent pangs of homesickness in people who were both nurtured and disciplined by the land.
But somewhere north of St. Louis, the look and feel of the towns changed, the churches becoming taller and narrower in design, with Germanic steeples and turrets. There was more money in these northern communities, and the wealth was reflected in the architecture. North of Cairo, Illinois, blacks would have moved forward on the train, exercising — many for the first time — their civil rights beyond Jim Crow’s grasp. A rolling plain feels different from a cleared jungle. And then over the earth’s curve, unfolding like a wide highway, was the capital of this new kingdom, the tall, storied buildings of Chicago. Chicago was a prairie town, spreading like pancake batter, widening along Lake Michigan, deepening in an endless absorption of farmland and ethnic settlements (reflected in the diversity of its modern urban checkerboard).
A porter at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago remembered the befuddlement he regularly witnessed: “If there was no one to meet [the arriving passengers], the newcomers seldom knew where to go. They might ask a Red Cap to direct them to the home of a friend — unaware that without an address the porter could be of little help in a city as large as Chicago. Or they might employ one of the professional guides who, for a fee, would help them find lodging. Some of the guides were honest, others were little more than confidence men. Travelers Aid and the railroad police tried to help the migrants and prevent exploitation; but for the newcomer without friends or relatives the first few days were often a terrifying experience.”
Greeted by the red glow of steel mills and the billowy, black, gritty smoke of factories working overtime, Muddy had moved from the world of the born to the world of the made.
“I had some people there [relatives],” Muddy recalled, “but I didn’t know where they was. I didn’t know nothing.” Leaving Stovall was the fulfillment of a dream so large he’d been almost unable to face it; he’d barely prepared. From the train station, he took a taxi, showing the driver the South Side address that had been burning a hole in his pocket, 3652 Calumet. He paid the driver to wait while he rang the bell. “I looked up a address of some boys that we’s raised up together and I came to their house and I stayed there. I got here on a Saturday, got a job working at [the Joanna Western Mills] paper factory, making containers. I was working Monday. Swing shift, three to eleven in the evening. Man, that’s the heaviest jive you ever saw in your life.” An arresting statement from a man long yoked to a cotton sack.
“Work there eight hours a day — I never did that before. My paycheck was forty-something bucks or fifty-something bucks a week. You got to be kiddin’, you know. Soon I put in some overtime, worked twelve hours a day and I brought a hundred and something bring-home pay. I said, ‘Goodgodamighty, look at the money I got.’ I have picked that cotton all the year, chop cotton all year, and I didn’t draw a hundred dollars.”
The heady times distracted him from the racial tensions underlying his bustling new home. Racism in Chicago was exacerbated by the competition for jobs between blacks and whites. Living conditions were cramped, Chicago’s South and West Sides bursting with southern black immigrants, many of whom were unprepared and ill-equipped to adapt to city life. Race riots were breaking out in other parts of the country, and Chicago’s Mayor “Big Ed” Kelly established a Committee on Race Relations. “During the last war we made a study after the riot,” commented one local African American politician. “This time let’s make the study before.”
The easy money eased Muddy’s transition, but music remained his focus. “I never did go get good jobs,” said Muddy. “I’d get them little old cheap jobs because I didn’t ever keep one too long. I got a job at the paper mill [loading] those forklift trucks, and then I got a little job workin’ for a firm that made parts for radios.” He also worked at a glass factory and as a truck driver, in addition to working the music scene at night. The clubs were active, but the recording studios were quiet. Muddy’s arrival coincided with a ban on all new recordings (August 1942 through November 1944) decreed by the president of the American Federation of Musicians, James Petrillo; Petrillo was trying to protect musicians who were losing live gigs to recordings.
Of course there was also the war to worry about and, still steamed, Stovall’s T. O. Fulton made sure that war caught up with Muddy quick. “Before I left,” Muddy recalled, “I go by Coahoma, tell this man at the [draft] board I got to go to Chicago to take care of a little business. You know they’s calling ’em into the army fast then. I say, ‘If you should need me in a couple of weeks, send the papers to Chicago.’ He gets on the phone, calls the manager at Stovall, and the manager says, ‘We done had this falling out,’ and bam, the papers was there. I don’t know what to do now. So this boy take me over to this little branch board up here and I told ’em my story and the man there say, ‘Don’t worry, you got a job?’
“ ‘Yeah, I’m working now,’ I tell him.
“ ‘Go on to your work,’ he says. ‘Don’t do nothing till you hear from us. Forget these papers.’ ”
Blues sounds in the early 1940s were still dominated by the Bluebird label, which had been releasing budget-priced 78s since 1933. Their roster had originally included such country blues artists as Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams, and Blind Willie McTell, but the sounds had become increasingly diluted.
“The blues Waters found on his arrival in Chicago was as well-turned and sophisticated as it often was empty of genuine emotion, and without the latter its guts were gone,” Pete Welding wrote. Welding was a music critic who founded Testament Records and, while living in Chicago in the 1960s and recording some of Muddy’s finest music, became a personal friend. “The vigorous, country-based blues that Chicago had refined, polished, and institutionalized since the 1920s, when the city had been established as the most influential blues recording center, had been progressively emasculated. . . . The once forceful, highly individualized blues had been diluted by large record firms to glossy, mechanistic self-parody and tasteless double entendre.” Muddy called it sweet jazz; the style has since come to be called hokum.
Bluebird was, at any rate, a marginal label. When Muddy arrived in 1943, Chicago was a jazz town. Nat “King” Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” was big; also Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers, and Billy Eckstine. “When Chicago was invaded [by southerners], there was nothing but swing music,” recalled Dave Myers, a pioneering electric bassist who came up from Mississippi in the 1930s. “Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the big bands. Swing was on the radio all the time, then [you hear] somebody playing records across the way and it’s all swing. My daddy played that old shoe stump, Mississippi stuff, and wasn’t nothing here relating to that at all.”
“People were going at that time for, I think you call it bebop,” said Muddy. “My blues still was the sad, old-time blues. You’d go in and tell [the club owners] you played blues, and a lot of them, they’d shake their head and say, ‘Sorry, can’t use you.’ ”
Some jazz clubs had a blues night — gigs that usually went to high-profile names familiar to Muddy through 78s and jukeboxes. Even those gigs weren’t great: according to union contracts, the pay for established names such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim was around ten dollars per person on a weekend night, or six dollars on a weeknight.
Without the clubs, the only venue open to Muddy was the house party, a get-together in someone’s home where the drinks were cheaper, the food more plentiful, the audience nearer the band, and where the musicians could establish their reputations. He was on unfamiliar turf, but it was a hustle he knew. “I played mostly on weekends, but I have played seven nights a week, worked five days, sometimes six days. Plenty of food, whiskey, fried chicken, and they had bootleg whiskey. I was making five dollars a night playing. That was good side money for me.” He purchased a suit of new clothes. It was one thing to look country in Memphis; in Chicago, even the cheap clothes were fine.
After flopping with his friends, Muddy sought out his relatives. Chicago blacks were largely segregated into two sprawling ghettos: the West Side and, a half-rung up the social ladder, the South Side. Within these tight communities were organizations, such as the Clarksdale Citizens Association, that were built around the tight communities left behind. Through their network, Muddy may have located his cousin Dan Jones, to whose West Side apartment he moved within several weeks of his arrival. Muddy’s daughter Azelene and her mother, Leola Spain, lived nearby.
Not long after, he got his own place. Dan Jones Sr., whom he’d known on Stovall, had a large truck, which he hired out to landlords who needed apartments and houses cleaned out or moved. One of the job’s perks was scavenging appliances and furniture left behind. Another perk was the advance notice on upcoming vacancies, and when a real estate company had him clean out an apartment near his own, he slid Muddy right in. Four doors down from Jones, at 1851 West Thirteenth Street, second floor, Muddy faced north, enjoying a comfortable morning light and temperate afternoons. His rent was cheap; while his cousin paid thirty-five dollars a month, Muddy paid twelve, plus utilities, for four rooms. “Old Man Jones fixed Muddy up,” Jimmy Rogers said of Muddy’s cousin. “Muddy had furniture all through that house, bed and dressers, end tables, stove, refrigerator, a little radio, and a record player.”
By 1944, Muddy was meeting the established musicians, including Big Bill Broonzy. “I call my style country style,” said Muddy. “Big Bill was the daddy of country-style blues singers. When I got here, he was the top man.”
In a photograph from the 1940s, a proud young Muddy is shaking hands with Big Bill. Bill’s left arm is around Muddy’s shoulders, which slump as if unable to support the notion of Broonzy’s embrace. Muddy’s serious expression cannot hide his pleasure — it may be disbelief — at where he finds himself, and with whom. The folks back home, he seems to be thinking, will never believe it.
For decades, Big Bill’s character resonated with Muddy. “You done made hits, you got a big name, the little fellow ain’t nothing,” Muddy said in the 1970s about the star attitude. “But Big Bill, he don’t care where you from. He didn’t look over you ’cause he been on records a long time. ‘Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay with it, you going to make it.’ That’s what Big Bill told me. Mostly I try to be like him.”
One of the earliest, most important, and longest-lasting friendships Muddy Waters made when he came to Chicago was with fellow guitarist Jimmy Rogers. Rogers worked at Sonora Radio and Cabinet Company, where he had been befriended by Jesse Jones, Muddy’s cousin. Jesse and his brother Dan Jr. didn’t play music, but they liked to be around those who did. They admired Jimmy’s skill — his relaxed and smooth vocal style, his uncomplicated yet intricate guitar chording and strumming. Their friendship solidified when Jesse got Jimmy transferred to a less dangerous department of the factory. “He got me into that part where my hands wouldn’t get cut off.”
Both Muddy and Jimmy were from the Delta, each raised by his grandmother. Rogers, however, had a more nomadic youth. He was born James A. Lane in Ruleville, Mississippi, on June 3, 1924. Shortly after moving the family to his home state of Georgia, Jimmy’s father was killed in a scuffle among coworkers at a sawmill. Jimmy’s mother moved them back to the Delta, and Jimmy was taken in by his grandmother. They moved often, living in several towns in several states: Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
His first guitar was a diddley bow, common in the country — broom wire nailed to the side of a house and plucked. More portable than a wall, harmonicas were inexpensive and accessible, and Rogers switched to one, learning music basics on that before practicing on other people’s guitars. “My grandmother, she was a Christian-type woman, and man, they’s really against music, blues, period,” said Rogers. “After I got of age, my grandmother seen where she wasn’t gonna be able to stop me from trying to play, so she just give me up, said, ‘Well, okay, you can do what you want to as far as that’s concerned.’ ”
He was soon exposed to live musicians: Houston Stackhouse, Tommy McLennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White. “They was men then,” he said. “I was a youngster.” He too had grown up listening to Sonny Boy Williamson II. “I would rush home every day around twelve o’clock to hear him. I’d be digging every inch of his sounds.”
Rogers began to earn a reputation, appearing at house parties and playing for “small change, all the whiskey that I could drink, and maybe a dollar and a half cash money.” In Memphis, he befriended Robert Lockwood Jr. and Joe Willie Wilkins (“My favorite men, I played with them quite a bit, picked up some chords from them too.”) When his grandmother moved to St. Louis, Jimmy encountered Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis.
As he matured, Rogers felt the pull to move north. “I could feel [racism] at the age of ten,” he remembered. “I could see it going through my grandmother and my uncles and other people that were older. I could see what they were going through, and I understood what they be talking about. I didn’t like the South. I always said, ‘As soon as I get big, I’m gone.’ ”
Rogers had family in Chicago and had been there several times before settling permanently in the mid-1940s. Initially, he lived with his great-uncle, but soon found an apartment of his own on the Near West Side, next to the Maxwell Street Market, which is where he was living when his cousin Jesse brought Muddy by.
“We started talking and he said he played guitar,” said Rogers. “So one weekend, we got together and started jamming over at his house. I knew what I was listening for on guitar, and Muddy felt the same way. . . . I was playing with different musicians. They didn’t really know what I wanted. I would hum it to them, and I would phrase it on the guitar, run the notes on the harmonica — they still couldn’t get it. Then Muddy Waters, I listened to him and I said, ‘I know what he need.’ I’d just add sound — what he was singing, that’s the way I would play, and give him a feeling to it that he could really open up and come on out with it. It rang a bell.” Rogers didn’t play with a slide and didn’t need to. “I let Muddy do all that and I just harmonize it and play along, fill in for him and make a turnaround. He liked it that way.”
Rogers had amplified his acoustic guitar with a DeArmond pickup, which fit beneath the strings in the sound hole. “Muddy had a hollow S curve [model] like the Gene Autry guitar,” said Rogers, who played a Gibson L-5, “and I took him to Eighteenth and Halsted [The Chicago Music Company] and got him a DeArmond pickup put on his guitar, got him a little amplifier, and then you could get sound out of it.” The pure acoustic guitar was fine in rural Mississippi because there were no sounds at night but the shallow breathing of God at rest, and the steady percussion of crickets and cicadas. Not so in a Chicago of clanging streetcars, trains, and automobiles out late on a party. Muddy also began using a thumbpick, which further intensified his volume.
The two men continued to meet at Muddy’s apartment, about a ten-minute walk for Jimmy. “Wouldn’t be nobody home but us musicians,” Rogers said. “We come in, plug up the amp, get us one of these half-pint or pint bottles and get some ideas. We’d run through a few verses and move on to something else and keep on. Finally, after maybe three or four days fooling around, you’d be done built a number. On weekends, we’d buy a few drinks and play guitar. So we decided then we’d start this house-party deal over again here in Chicago.”
Another important and early friendship, though not as long-lasting, was between Muddy and a guitarist named Claude Smith, better known as Blue Smitty. Smitty was born in Arkansas the same year as Jimmy Rogers, but began visiting Chicago when he was only four.
As he told it, Smitty’s guitar skills came “as a gift.” “One night it was raining,” he recalled. “It was summertime. A guy lived down the road from us and I got up at about one o’clock at night — everybody was asleep — and I walked down and asked him to let me use his guitar. He said, ‘What are you gonna do with the guitar this time of night?’ I said, ‘I’m gonna play it.’ And he let me have it, we wrapped it up to keep it from getting wet, and I went home and sat on the porch and started playing them six strings. And my mother get up and come to the door, she hear me out there: ‘When did you learn how to play the guitar?’ I said, ‘Tonight.’ And we sat up all night and listened to me play that guitar. I was about fourteen.”
In the mid-1940s, Smitty, about twenty, found work in Chicago as an electrician. Muddy met him through the gregarious Jesse Jones. At the time, his music was a mix of southern gutbucket blues and fancier finger work, blending the likes of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and jazz master Charlie Christian.
“I went down in Jewtown to buy some guitar strings,” said Smitty, referring, like Greektown, to the colloquial name of the immigrant market neighborhood on the Near West Side. “It started raining and we were standing under the canopy. This one guy was going in the music store and he asked me if I would hold his guitar. He had five strings on the guitar and I just started playing it. This fellow was standing next to me, he said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Sure I can play.’ He said, ‘I got somebody I’d like for you to meet. Then maybe you can teach him something.’ I said, ‘Who is that?’ He said, ‘His name is McKinley Morganfield, he’s my cousin, but they call him Muddy Waters.’ ”
Smitty went to Muddy’s apartment. “Muddy was sitting down in the middle of the floor and he had the pickup out of his guitar, and he was trying to fix it,” Smitty recalled. “The ground wire had come a-loose, it needed soldering. So I soldered the wire in his pickup and put it back in the guitar. Muddy played first. He had a cheap little amplifier there, but it sounded pretty good. He said, ‘Do you play?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play.’ ” They were like an eager couple on a first date. Muddy handed Smitty his guitar, and Smitty retuned it from the Spanish to standard tuning. Smitty remembered Muddy saying, “I don’t know anything about that other tuning, I play with slide all the time.”
Motivated by Muddy, Smitty found steady work, buying a Gibson amplifier and then his own DeArmond pickup. “So Muddy and I started practicing together. I tried getting him away from that slide, ’cause I could play single-note picking. And I would teach him how to play the bass to what I was playing. He always had a good sense of timing. And from then on, every week, sometimes four or five times a week, in the evenings, we’d get together.”
Himself inspired, Muddy began taking two guitars to house parties, one tuned to standard for picking, and one tuned to Spanish (open G) for sliding. “He really learnt me some things on the guitar, too,” confirmed Muddy. “I played mostly bottleneck until I met Smitty. It was a very, very good improvement he did for me, because I didn’t have to try to do everything with the slide by itself.”
The world of South Side blues was small. Smitty and Jimmy Rogers had already been performing together — with Jimmy on harmonica, a piano player called King, and a drummer known as Pork Chop. “I was playing with Smitty and I got a few ideas from him,” said Rogers. “When Muddy came to Chicago, we started hanging around together, him and Smitty and myself.”
Smitty was cursed, however, with a good day job. Unlike Muddy and Jimmy, he wasn’t stone committed to music, and though he was a natural talent, he often wouldn’t show up. “If Blue Smitty wasn’t there,” said Rogers. “I’d have to play the guitar. If he was, I’d play harmonica.” Drummers were scarce. The country blues had never demanded one — a guitarist stomping the wood floor resonated well enough. In Chicago, the paying gigs were jazz, and no blues drummers had developed. So the second guitarist would loosen his strings to play bass parts and keep rhythm.
Calvin Jones, who later joined Muddy’s band as a bassist, stumbled onto the newcomer at a small nightspot a few blocks from Muddy’s apartment. “I went to a skin game [cards], gambling in someone’s apartment, and I heard this guitar, he had his slide going. So I went to the window and he was right across the street. I left the game and went down there. He had a harmonica player with him. It was an acoustic guitar what Muddy had. It was a weeknight, they didn’t even have a bandstand, they were just sitting in their chairs playing. Wasn’t nobody in the joint, three peoples maybe. I asked him what his name was. ‘Muddy Waters.’ He said it real cool.”
“We’d call it scabbing,” said Rogers. “You hit here, you set up with asking this guy that owns the club if he wouldn’t mind you playing a few numbers — quite naturally it was good for his business, he would say okay. You’d play a number or two, they’d like it, you’d pick up a buck here, a buck there.”
Before long Blue Smitty managed to land the band a proper club gig. “So one day I was going to get a haircut” — Smitty’s career-changing stories have the most prosaic of beginnings — “and while I was in this barber shop at the corner of Ogden and Twelfth, this one guy said to me, ‘While you’re waiting, play us a piece or two.’ ” Smitty did, and the guy told him, “I’d like to have some guys that can play as good as you, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. What are you gonna charge me for playing?” Smitty reported back to Muddy and the trio was hired for five dollars apiece per night. The response was good; they added Thursdays.
As his fan base grew, Muddy must have heard time and again, “Hey, you’re pretty good, you ever record for anybody?” That none of his peers had heard of the Library of Congress probably slowed him not at all from pulling out a copy of his record, maybe wrapped in cloth so it wouldn’t break, his name typed on the label, visible if you squinted because he’d worn it out playing and showing it off. Hell yes he’d recorded.
And while his fellow rural city dwellers had found little kinship in the jaunty, unemotional, ragtimey sounds that predominated, they loved music that evoked the sawdust on a juke-joint floor, the dust that the mule plow kicked up, the emptiness of a lonely country road. Muddy had never aspired to play with urban flash, basking instead in the slow country blues feel, keeping it as his foundation even as he modernized it. It was Muddy’s own deal with the devil: he left his native community but gained a larger one, a wealthier one that could purchase the nostalgia and authenticity of his music.
Much of that modernization came via a new instrument. The electric guitar was the Delta bluesman’s answer to the mechanical cotton picker. “We were playing our little clubs and a ‘cue-stick’ [acoustic] guitar wouldn’t answer there, not in a liquor club,” recalled Muddy. “My uncle Joe [Grant] had been in Chicago a long time and everybody played those electric guitars. He told me I ought to play one, and he bought me one. It wasn’t no name-brand electric guitar, but it was a built-in electric guitar, not a pickup just stuck on. It gave me so much trouble that that’s probably why I forgot the name. Every time I looked around I had to have it fixed. Finally it got stoled from me in one of them little neighborhood clubs, and the next one I got me was a Gretsch, and that’s the one I used on all my early hits.” The DeArmond had allowed for a longer sustain in the notes, but the electric guitar was a whole new beast. It affected the approach to singing and the role of the other instruments. With it — and in particular with Muddy taking it on — the Chicago blues, the urban blues, the modern blues, were nascent.
“It was a very different sound, not just louder,” said Muddy. “I thought that I’d come to like it — if I could ever learn to play it.” The difference was not in the music Muddy created, but in how he created it — how his fingers attacked the string, how his slide worked the neck. “That loud sound would tell everything you were doing,” he explained. “On acoustic you could mess up a lot of stuff and no one would know that you’d ever missed.”
The sound was heavy, especially when all three guitars played together, intertwined and forceful — Muddy sliding, Jimmy laying patterns under him, and Smitty punching up the bass parts. Each could trade off roles (except for the slide), and their vocal styles were varied. And strangely, wonderfully, behind the closed walls of a club in the later hours of the evening, at the end of a long day, a heartless day, an exhilarating day, a calm resembling quiet could settle on the city and the electrified sound could evoke a downright backcountry night.
Eddie Boyd, kin to Muddy and raised near Stovall, had come to Chicago in 1941, and he played a sleek, smoother style. “He wanted me to play like Johnny Moore,” said Muddy, “which I wasn’t able to play the guitar like. He wanted it to be a kind of sweet blues.” With Eddie’s guidance, Muddy and Smitty joined Local 208, the “Negro” chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, and fell into a good gig. “Jimmy Rogers, he was having girl trouble during that time, so some way or the other he got out of the band,” remembered Smitty. He and Muddy began playing with Boyd. A sign went up at the Flame Club: BLUES, BLUES, AND MORE BLUES. When Boyd took another gig in nearby Gary, Indiana, Muddy and Smitty got Sunnyland Slim, another popular pianist, to replace him. That trio left the Flame and went to the Purple Cat on Madison.
Jimmy Rogers got his act together about the time Blue Smitty was losing his, so Muddy never lacked accompaniment for house parties and small clubs. Nor did he lack accompaniment in his apartment. In the mid-1940s, Muddy was shacking up with Annie Mae Anderson, whom he’d known at Stovall. “Nice-looking girl,” said Elve Morganfield. “At Stovall, she was married to Sam Anderson. Like I said, Muddy was a Casanova, he was happy-go-lucky. He had ’em all. He loved them young women, oh yeah.”
In Chicago, Muddy was becoming his own man. His grandmother died in 1946, and home may never have seemed more distant. He was a beneficiary on her insurance, quickly spending the money on a luxury he’d grown accustomed to in Mississippi. “He got his paycheck and with that other little money he inherited he paid the down payment on the car,” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “It was a rust-colored Chevy, nineteen forty two-door. Musicians, blues players, didn’t have cars too much then, and that’s what really started him into going around.” John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson began hiring Muddy for gigs in Gary, Indiana, and other distant places.
Sonny Boy’s skills on the harmonica thrust the instrument from back pockets to center stage. He had a good-time bomp bomp abomp bomp sound. “If you liked blues, you liked his,” said Muddy. “He had that particular little twinkle in the voice that got to people.” One name for the harmonica is “mouth organ,” and his mastery on the twenty-five-cent novelty item brought it to a level of respect shared by the piano. When notes were held, the harmonica could lay a foundation not unlike a keyboard, but the instrument really shined when riffs punctuated or bolstered lyrics. “Mississippi saxophone” was another name, and blues bands made it the poor man’s horn section. Sonny Boy developed a choking style, not squeezing the life out of the harmonica, but bellowing his life’s breath into it. The bends and slurs — making the instrument say “wah wah” — gave it personality. A song such as “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” could have both a sense of humor and an undercurrent of terror, all built around a hook that made it wildly popular.
Sonny Boy drank on his gigs and couldn’t keep a band together. “Eddie Boyd and myself and Sonny Boy was playing together,” Muddy said. “Sonny Boy was mostly doing all the singing and they wanted to keep me in the background. But Sonny Boy’d keep a-gettin’ high, we got to try to carry it on. So one night Eddie done got tired of singing all night, and Sonny Boy got drunk — Eddie know I could sing ’cause we raised together — Eddie said, ‘Why don’t you sing one?’ I could see he was sung out. I pulled the mike to me, opened this big mouth up, boy, and the house went crazy, man. I sang one of [Lowell] Fulsom’s songs, ‘Trouble.’ ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble, all in this world I see.’ And I was talkin’ quietly to the people, quietly, and they went nuts. And Sonny Boy heard that noise goin’ on, he jumped up, grabbed that harp and taken that mike. ‘My baby left me, left me a mule to ride.’ ” Muddy laughed. “He seen how I brought down the house. We worked around quite a little bit together, till Sonny Boy got drunk and got us fired. Sonny Boy wouldn’t do right. He had that big name too, all them big records out, but he loved whiskey better than he did his work, man.”
They stayed friendly until June 1, 1948. While walking home from a gig, Sonny Boy was robbed. His assailant, never identified, took his wallet, his watch, three harmonicas, and most of his life. Despite intercranial hemorrhaging, Sonny Boy crawled the last block home to his doorstep, where his wife found him — and presumed him drunk. Three hours later he was dead.
By now, the Petrillo ban on recording had been lifted, and the recording industry had awakened to a new and different scene. Talent scouts once again scurried from club to club, but instead of the smooth, sappy music from between the wars, they found another new sound had taken root in the raucous clubs. New artists had reinvigorated old ideas, and new record labels were springing up to give them a shot. After three years of trying, Muddy’s devotion to music, to the late nights playing to spilled beer, the next day’s ache at his day job — paid off in 1946 with his first two commercial sessions. Muddy’s first session was for an independent producer; the second had him in the ranks of the major labels.
From the first, only one track was issued. “Mean Red Spider,” produced by J. Mayo Williams, the pioneering African American independent producer, was more representative of the existing Chicago sound than of the new developments Muddy was forging. He sings lead, but his guitar is buried beneath a squealing clarinet, a busy saxophone, and a ragtimey piano. The presence of these reed instruments reflects the influence of the big-band sound; the fact that there’s only two and not a whole section indicates the style’s diminishing sway.
“I remember that session,” said Muddy. “Somewhere here in Chicago we did it. We got half sideman [half the union-scale sideman’s rates]. We didn’t get forty-one twenty-five. Forty-one twenty-five was sidemen’s then, eighty-two fifty was the leader. I musta got twenty-something dollars out of it.”
Muddy’s name isn’t even on the record. “Mean Red Spider” was attributed to James “Sweet Lucy” Carter and His Orchestra. Mr. Carter may be featured on the A-side (“Let Me Be Your Coal Man”), but he’s nowhere on Muddy’s track. “James Carter, I don’t know,” said Muddy, looking at the label copy brought to him in the 1970s by blues researcher Jim O’Neal, who was confirming what sounded like Muddy’s presence. “But that is me. I got a little guitar in there somewhere, I hear it every once in a while. I thought that record was drownded in the river.”
Through acquaintances made at that session, Muddy was introduced to “Baby Face” Leroy Foster, a skinny, smiling guy who’d hit Chicago from the South earlier that year. Foster was a skilled guitarist who also had a knack for drumming, and unlike the jazz players, he shared the juke-house aggressiveness that Muddy and Jimmy were putting into electric blues. With drums, the group landed a gig on Roosevelt Road and their following continued to build. Baby Face switched between guitar and drums, Jimmy could pull out his harmonica, or all three could play guitars and sing. “When we discovered what was going down,” Muddy remembered, “then I said, ‘Wow, man! We got something here!’ ”
This boost in popularity brought him to the attention of producer Lester Melrose, who was responsible for “the Bluebird sound,” the chiffon blues — what Muddy called sweet jazz — that was waning in popularity. Melrose, a white Illinoisian in his fifties when Muddy arrived, had been the dominating force on the blues recording scene for the past decade and a half. He was responsible for much of the roster at both major blues labels, RCA (which controlled Bluebird) and Columbia.
On Friday, September 27, 1946, Muddy cut eight tracks for Columbia Records under Melrose’s supervision. Muddy was leader on three tracks, backed vocalist Homer Harris on three, and backed pianist Jimmy Clark on two. There are no horns on any tracks. The arrangements, with piano, drums, and bass, might have seemed crowded in a Mississippi juke joint, but they were positively spare for Chicago. Booking three heavy-throated, unknown vocalists, Melrose was clearly looking for the next big thing. Stylistically, he was on target — Muddy’s vocals would be imitated by a generation — but Melrose’s roots in sweet blues bog these tracks in the past. In his introductions, Muddy almost pushes the sound into the future: his guitar is prominent and hitting heavy, but when a second guitar should kick in, it’s instead the piano, sounding like yesterday and miked to play lead.
Muddy exhibits great confidence in his playing. His amplifier is turned up and, when appropriate, he lets the distortion rip. On Harris’s topical “Atomic Bomb Blues,” Muddy and pianist James Clark trade the hammered triplets that would become a feature of Muddy’s later band. Cognizant of Melrose’s sophisticated tastes, Muddy kept his slide in his pocket. “That country stuff might sound funny to ’em,” he later remembered thinking. His phrasing, nonetheless, is imbued with a Delta feel; Muddy has Mississippi at his core. He also has Chicago at his fingertips; his comfort with the piano indicates that, through regular scabbing, he and his cronies had become accustomed to larger lineups.
As fall turned to winter and 1946 became history, Muddy watched these sessions sit neglected on Lester Melrose’s shelf. The Jimmy Clark tracks came out (“Blues singer with piano, string bass, drums, and guitar,” with no names given on the label), but Muddy’s, along with those of Homer Harris, remained vaulted for almost a quarter century.
“You gotta have something that the record company wants,” said Muddy. “And sometimes they are afraid to take a chance. They got a good blues seller, don’t have to make another blues singer. People interested in people selling. You runs a store and you carrying brand-new merchandise, you don’t know whether it’ll sell or not. And they wasn’t takin’ a chance on mine.”