Muddy Waters was nearly thirty-eight years old and entering the best years of his recording career. There in Chicago — which had become the Delta’s second home, which had given new breath to the spirit of Harlem’s Renaissance, which had factories burning ’round the clock — Muddy was about to help shape modern music.
Words were becoming a major Chicago export: the Chicago Defender had become the most influential black publication in the country. Elijah Muhammad, whose Muslim theology was changing the way many African Americans thought about their place in the world, moved his headquarters there. Novelist Richard Wright, after living there for a decade, wrote the classic Black Boy. But Muddy, in less than three minutes, struck in the gut, no eyeglasses or education required.
Lyrically, most of Muddy’s songs were about sex — sex with someone else’s wife, sex with someone else’s girlfriend, sex and trouble. But it was always a trouble he survived, a scrape he escaped. Sex was sex, but sex also became an analogy for a kind of freedom, a freedom to serve himself, to damn the torpedoes, the shift supervisor, and the overseer’s big gun. The sound of the songs reflected the newfound ebullience: Muddy, near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, corralled the sense of postwar possibility and excitement. The have-nots were finally having — not having much, but even a little was a lot. The muscle of his electric guitar and the force of his ensemble sound and the fierce assertiveness of his voice unleashed the exuberance of a people. There was cause for celebration, and Muddy was the vehicle.
Billboard, July 1950: “Leonard Chess busts right into the disk field with his first two records on his very own ‘Chess’ label. Real clickeroos. ‘My Foolish Heart’ by Gene Ammons in the number-one spot among the jazz and blues locations here [Chicago], and ‘Rollin’ Stone’ by Muddy Waters getting gobs of orders from the Southland.”
“Rollin’ Stone” is a song about power, about rootless — and ruthless — independence. Muddy plays the electric guitar with all the force he’s been brandishing in the noisy clubs, though completely unaccompanied, laying bare every flick of his thumb and pull of his forefinger. A quick couple bass notes establish the rhythm, then a loping third note. A few more to catch your balance, then the whole angular riff again. Its jaggedness draws all attention to his right hand, his long fingers, the creases on the skin, the shadows from his cotton picking, guitar picking calluses. The distortion is bone rattling: the sound of teeth chattering, or being smashed. It’s the sound of industrialized, amplified, sex drive, overdrive power. He begins to sing: “I weesh,” enunciating to rhyme with the next line, “I was a catfish.” The sound is animalistic — predatory, after whatever comes his way:
Swimming in the ho-oh, deep blue sea.
I would have all you good looking women feeshing
Feeshing after me.
Sure enough after me.
Then the guitar says it one time, leaving us a moment to contemplate this bottom-feeder.
I went to my baby’s house
And I set down, o-oh, on her step.
She said, “Come on in now, Muddy.
You know my husband just now left.”
Sure enough he just now left.
The guitar says it a couple times this verse, symmetry giving way to feeling. The riff saunters and scoots, a dog caught eating from another’s bowl, caught sleeping in his master’s bed, under his covers and all up in his sheets, sure enough where he’s not supposed to be.
The guitar break is lightly picked, his bass notes punctuating this little dance on the high notes. It’s not gleeful, but it’s impudent, buying the husband a shot at the bar while still tasting his wife’s lips.
Well I feel
Yes I feel
Baby like that low-down time ain’t long.
I’m going to catch the first thing smoking
Back down the road I’m going.
And a parting ping from the high notes, dust settling where once was a man, escaped. The stealth is reflected in the menacing distortion, the craggy amplified sustain; Muddy is a thin snake that cuts a wide swath. There is much empty space in this performance, imbued with the power of a pause, of letting a note hang in the air, the anticipation of the next one. Muddy doesn’t tell all. His pause asks us to fill the emptiness; it draws out our emotions, feelings, fears, compelling us to add meaning.
This monument to time and rhythm, this anthem to mobility, is a remarkable appreciation of the divisions and subdivisions of space, of patterns and how they change. And it was an auspicious announcement by a new label, especially when paired with Gene Ammons’s solid but derivative interpretation of the standard “My Foolish Heart,” which was released simultaneously. “Rollin’ Stone” sold well and Muddy left his day job. Jimmy Rogers soon followed suit. Walter never needed what he couldn’t get on Maxwell Street; he had no job to quit.
In the summer of 1950, Leonard finally began expanding Muddy’s sound. He wouldn’t listen to reason or to the musical possibilities, but he’d heard the response to the renegade “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” First he added Walter, and then finally Jimmy, who brought his first hit, “That’s All Right,” to his first Chess session. Over the coming year and a half, Jimmy recorded all his material at the end of Muddy’s sessions, sometimes with Muddy and members of the band, but also with a group he put together for his own gigs. “Muddy was never a binding man or a selfish man,” said Jimmy. “So when I would be playing with Muddy, naturally the audience would know my records and ask for me to play them, so I would step forward, within the show Muddy was doing, and take my numbers.” Just as Big Bill and Sonny Boy had spawned his career, Muddy helped others, even if it ultimately meant losing their help. “I know when you make ’em a star they’re gonna leave. But I can’t hold the whole world by myself, they should get out there and do something.”
After playing, Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter cruised the streets of Chicago’s night, free from the day shift, a few little bottles along for the ride. The musicians analyzed the night’s work, considered new musical possibilities, the Chicago competition, the Mississippi competition. In the driver’s seat was Muddy’s childhood friend Bo — Andrew Bolton, the backstage member of the band.
“Bo was from Stovall,” said the Reverend Willie Morganfield, Muddy’s cousin. “He was a fine person, he just didn’t take anything. He was like a bodyguard for Muddy. And you just didn’t bother Muddy if he was around. He was that kind of guy.” When fans got too excited around Muddy, Bo would institute calm; when jealous women came at Muddy, Bo was a wall they couldn’t bust through. “Bo was a nice boy, just couldn’t read and write,” said one of Muddy’s later bandmates. “Wouldn’t know his name in boxcar letters. He got his learning from just looking and looking.”
Muddy and Bo shared responsibility for each other. Bo ran errands for Geneva, cooked pancakes for Geneva’s sons at the kitchen stove, would later teach Cookie to drive. In the meantime, he kept his regular job. “I always remember Bo telling me that he got paid every week,” said Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie, “and therefore, if Muddy had a gig on Friday or Saturday, they were set because Bo would have money so Muddy could get his hair did.”
“Seven nights a week, that’s how my schedule ran,” said Muddy. “And then Sunday afternoon we would do a matinee somewhere. I played out of town, but we could stay in the city and work seven nights a week.” Weekends in Gary or as far away as Memphis were common. Muddy handled many of his own gigs, though Leonard helped, and so did Big Bill Hill, a disc jockey with his own Colt Management Company.
Days, Muddy stayed at home. He relaxed, recovering from the previous night, preparing to expend it all again that evening. Geneva would make him ice packs, which he’d wear across his forehead, lying in his bed or watching a baseball game on TV. The White Sox were his team, though he admired Brooklyn’s Jackie Robinson, who had recently integrated Major League Baseball. He looked after Geneva’s two boys. “My first memory of Muddy?” Charles, Muddy’s younger stepson, said. “I was coming home from school, living on the West Side, and he was listening to his record with a fella that lived across the street. And when he would play down to different clubs, he would slick his hair back, have bangs the way black people used to wear their hair. When I got out of order, he’d put me over his lap and whip me with a belt, a big heavy thick belt. But I really didn’t get that much out of order.”
Muddy’s classic lineup solidified with two new members, first in 1950, then in 1951. Drummer Elga Edmonds — that’s his rarely used correct name; friends usually called him Elgin, like both the dependable clock company and the nearby city in Illinois (though other variations for his last name included Edwards, Edmonton, and Evans) — was born in the land of Lincoln and had a musical mind-set different from the Delta. “Elgin” was steady playing jazz gigs and was known throughout town for the book he kept; if you needed a drummer or any other musician, Elgin could help.
Muddy needed a drummer who knew to follow his singing and not to force turnarounds and changes just because standard convention called for it every eight or twelve bars. Elgin’s timing was good, he liked brushes so he wasn’t too loud, and if he lacked flair, flair was not short in Muddy’s group. As a jazzman, Elgin was not thrilled about taking a blues gig, but they paid and jazz bookings were increasingly losing out; the blues was drawing better audiences in Chicago, building on the excitement of the new sound.
Despite their differing musical backgrounds, Elgin quickly found common ground with Muddy: cards, drinking, and food. “Elgin could eat,” drummer Freddie Crutchfield recalled. “He was a pork eater, wouldn’t eat no beef, nothing but pork. Ten dollars worth of pork chops, ten dollars worth of pork loin, nothing but pork. Pork, pork, pork, and all these sauces. He was a short guy but short and fat. He had a big round face, nice-looking guy, smiled a lot. He could talk and play cards. Him and Muddy and all of them, they’d be playing.” A dependable drummer who played Casino was just right for this band.
When the fifth card player joined the band on piano in 1951, the template for the modern pop group was set. Otis Spann, a solid man who boxed in his youth and competed in semipro football, played the eighty-eights with fluidity, his left-hand rumble as agile as his right-hand tinkle. He could amble on the bottom and crash on the top — without getting in the way of the vocalist. Born on March 21, 1930, Spann was the child of musicians. His mother, Josephine Erby Spann, played guitar and recorded once with Memphis Minnie. His father, Frank Houston Spann, played piano and preached. Spann’s mother died in the mid-1940s, and her teenaged son went to Chicago, where his father and an aunt resided. He plastered walls by day and got plastered by night, hanging in bars and sidling up to pianos. He befriended the smoky-voiced Big Maceo Merriweather, listening to his swinging bass hand entwine with Tampa Red’s guitar; he keenly observed the rough-and-tumble piano style of Little Brother Montgomery and Sunnyland Slim. His boozy voice was early earned. Gin. Or anything alcoholic. It had little discernible effect on his behavior, and his playing was always superb, intricate, and relevant.
Spann had lost a gig and Jimmy knew he was “scufflin’, sleepin’ in cars. So I told him Muddy needed a piano player. He said, ‘Yeah, man.’ As long as he get him a few nickels and get him some whiskey and get a girl to look at him — that was Spann.” Muddy was not eager for a piano, but Spann hounded him. They soon became such close friends that they called themselves brothers. Though they were not related by blood, their musical kinship, like their friendship, was of the closest kind.
“It made a big difference to bring him in because we had a full-bodied music. That piano really fill up things,” said Muddy. “See, my blues is not as easy to play as most people think they are. I makes my blues in different numbers, sometimes thirteen, fifteen, fourteen, just the way I feel. Spann, that’s the way he was. He don’t care what kind of time you break, he can break it with you.” And Otis Spann was happy to serve as the preeminent blues sideman; he fully appreciated the possibilities of playing backup, and leading a band would have interfered with his drinking.
Muddy, Jimmy, Walter, Elgin, and Spann were a solid unit for a year and a half. Muddy’s classic group was not only powerful, they were also a good show; Spann, Jimmy, and Walter could step in to sing backup and also take the lead on their own songs, and Walter and Jimmy could double on the other’s instrument. There was always something to watch. The piano had previously restrained Muddy’s contemporary edge, but that was before he heard Otis Spann; the band would revolve around both men for the next two decades, fully two-thirds of Muddy’s career. But while club patrons heard the sound of the future, Leonard (his sales indicating no need to change Muddy’s sound) didn’t, and it would be two years before Otis Spann appeared on a Muddy Waters recording.
Powered by the band’s club success, Muddy cut several of his deepest amplified Delta blues over the next eight months: “Long Distance Call,” “Honey Bee,” “She Moves Me,” “Still a Fool,” and, first, “Louisiana Blues.”
“All that stuff came to me real good,” said Muddy. “I can remember that a lot of the records I have made, I first made those songs up during my workdays out on the farm.” Muddy’s wiry electric slide and Walter’s acoustic harmonica entwine in this backwoods shuffle like Spanish moss on an oak. The rhythm evokes the banging of a tattered suitcase being pulled down a bumpy road. “Louisiana Blues,” a slowed variation on the “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” melody, secured Muddy’s introduction to a national audience by becoming his first top-ten blues hit.
With a hit, times got real good for the new blues stars. They picked up a regular night at Ada’s Lounge and Chicken Shack, and three gigs weekly at Joe’s Rendezvous Lounge. They played regular Sunday afternoon matinees at Silvio’s, rushing over to Sam Evans’s Ebony Lounge for a night gig, Sam hawking Muddy’s talent on his daily radio show. (Muddy dedicated the flip side of “Louisiana Blues” to his patron, naming the instrumental the “Evans Shuffle.”) Previous ads had announced him as “Young Muddy Waters,” but with the release of “Louisiana Blues,” they began trumpeting: “Blues Guitar King.”
Muddy did not forget those he’d displaced. He gave his intermission spots to Big Bill Broonzy and tried to assist Tampa Red. “I was playing at the 708 Club on the South Side,” said Muddy. “I tried to give Tampa a few dollars. He say, ‘No, I don’t need no charity.’ That kinda embarrassed me. I thought I was doing something great.”
“Long Distance Call” and “Honey Bee,” from the same session, followed “Louisiana Blues” onto the charts — three top-ten hits within six months. “Long Distance Call” was a cheating song, but the perspective was Geneva’s. Outside his home, even just blocks away, Muddy made no pretense of hiding his extramarital affairs. He openly courted young women, even while his young mistress du jour was in the club. Soul star Bobby Rush remembered he and Willie Mabon playing and three women getting in a fight over Muddy. “I instigated it just to get them fighting,” said Rush. “Willie Mabon was playing the piano, his hands never stopped, he said, ‘Let ’em fight, me and you will fuck ’em all.’ ”
The session on July 11, 1951, was one of the most amazing of Muddy’s career. Walter, barely twenty-one and still dismissive of the world’s slow turning, was at a creative peak this day, what Jimmy Rogers called “popping.” This session, which produced “She Moves Me” and “Still a Fool,” was later called Independence Day for the harmonica, but really it was Independence Day for Walter. Previously, he played his harp into a microphone that, like a vocal, went directly to the tape recorder. On this session, he plugged into an amplifier and had the engineer mike that instead. He could manipulate the amp and have that mediating sound recorded instead of his harp directly. The difference is night and day, akin to the change Muddy achieved on electric guitar. The harmonica was about to move from the country to the city. It was a revolution.
(The new route for Walter’s microphone caused some complications. The studio amplifier — there was only one — had two inputs, and with Walter joining Muddy, he displaced Jimmy. Jimmy had very little but contempt for Leonard, so he may not have felt like giving his blood and guts that day; he sat out. But Walter was on a tear. He was heaving blood and guts.)
Leonard was on edge. Not one for changes, he was already made tense by the vocal echo chamber he’d just jury-rigged from a sewer pipe. Now Walter was seriously fucking with the sound. Something had to give, and it did after the first tune, when they were cutting “She Moves Me.” “My drummer couldn’t get that beat on ‘She Moves Me,’ ” said Muddy. “My drummer wasn’t doin’ nothing, just dum-chick dum, but he couldn’t hold it there to save his damn life, and Leonard Chess knew where it was, so Leonard told him, ‘Get the fuck out of the way. I’ll do that.’ ” Leonard liked the beat emphasized, appealing to the dance floor. (“You sure worked for your money,” said Odie Payne, another Chess drummer. “[Leonard] had you playing so hard, I just didn’t believe it. The drummer would be the loudest thing in there.”) When Elgin could not deliver, Leonard burst from the studio glass and, as if on a dare, took the drumsticks from him.
Psychology has as much to do with record producing as does musical knowledge. If artists are trying too hard and have lost their natural feel, the producer deflects their attention, unleashing their innate artistry. A producer will set an artist on edge — if that discomfort will create great art. “Blues is nothing but the truth, truth that at one time or another in his lifetime the singer has felt,” said Phil Chess. “Our job was to try to bring out points in his mind that he might have forgotten, to give him ideas, to get him to think about some things that were happening down in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, or wherever. It’s actually like psychiatry, you try to talk to him for him to bring out the things himself.”
Leonard was known as a particularly aggressive shrink. “Leonard calling people a motherfucker,” said Jimmy Rogers, “that was just his way of saying good morning to blues musicians. At Chess if you didn’t curse you wasn’t recognized!” (Muddy was immediately comfortable with that; Colonel Stovall had been the same way.)
On “She Moves Me,” Leonard pounded the bass drum to make the dead jump up and run. It reverberates through the years right to the listener’s gut, like a heart that pounds when your crush enters the room. In response, Walter shapes his notes like a sculptor — elongating, eliding, quivering, and shaking. You can almost hear him figuring out how to play by listening to the sounds he’s just made emanate from the amp. His notes float like crimson leaves that skip in the wind. “Oh man, I wished you could have seen Little Walter,” Muddy said. “While you’re recording, he be dashing all around you everywhere, changing harps, running all around the studio, but he never get in your way. He had ideas, put a lot of trick things in there, getting all different sounds. Aww, he was the greatest. He always had ideas.” “She Moves Me” again put Muddy on Billboard’s top ten.
But they weren’t done yet. Next, Walter put down his harp and plugged in Jimmy’s guitar. The creative juices were spilling off him and Jimmy didn’t want to slip in the puddle. Walter couldn’t play a lot of guitar, but the bit he learned he mastered, and he throws his whole physical self into this song. “Still a Fool” is played with all the heaviness of Muddy’s full band in the clubs, but with the band stripped away. No concessions are made, no accommodations for the pared-down instrumentation. Two guitars and a drum in 1951 can’t get more electric than this; in Glen Allan, Mississippi, or broadcast live on the Delta’s KFFA, this sound would have caused riots.
“Still a Fool,” a paean to the outside woman, is a song as important for what it suggests as what it says. The guitar’s burning distortion evokes an over-the-top madness, an uncontrollable desire beyond all reason, of fucking a woman between rows of cotton, then stepping one row over and having her sister. “They say she’s no good,” he sings, “but she’s all right by me.” Women were a matter of quantity over quality to Muddy, and “Still a Fool” is his best attempt to explain himself. Musically, the song revisits the “Rollin’ Stone” riff. Leonard is still on the studio floor, banging the bass drum; the sweat has got to be soaking his shirt, pouring from his brow. Walter’s bass notes are like a pulse: you can feel the beat as it approaches, as it rides through you, as it passes. Muddy picks the six strings, raw and visceral, a deep world of hard blues, ominous, horrific, his guitar in unison with his vocal, Walter attuned to Muddy’s spatial and aural insights, dirty dancing around him. Moaning and humming reach for what words fail to say. There are four verses with no guitar break, nothing to diminish the onslaught; and slaughter is ultimately this music’s subject. “Still a Fool” hit the national top-ten charts in late November of 1951, and advertisements announced “King of Blues Muddy Waters And His Blues Boys.” Playing a Chicago jazz club during an off night, they were drawing bigger crowds than the main attraction. “They even named it the Muddy Waters Blues,” said Freddie Crutchfield. “When they were going to play the blues, most of the guys said, ‘We’re going to play the Muddy Waters Blues.’ ” He was becoming his own genre.
Down in Memphis, meanwhile, just before “She Moves Me” was recorded, a middle-aged man named Chester Burnett walked through the doors of the Memphis Recording Service and recorded his first single for producer Sam Phillips, who had yet to start his Sun Records label and was instead selling and leasing his tracks. Leonard Chess bought Burnett’s first recording and would later acquire the man’s contract; Burnett recorded under a pseudonym, and his “Moaning at Midnight” was about to make Howlin’ Wolf a star.
Like Muddy, Wolf embraced the Delta feel. His parents lived in Drew, Mississippi, which was near Charlie Patton’s home, and Wolf learned directly from the seminal Delta artist. He roamed the Delta juke joints, picking up gigs and earning a reputation. He later got a radio show in West Memphis, where his trademark howl, a variation on the falsetto favored by Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Muddy, and others, was broadcast far and wide. The burst in popularity of Muddy’s electric blues band sound — “Long Distance Call” was on the charts just before Wolf made his first recordings and “Honey Bee” was rising — informed Wolf’s music, whetted Sam Phillips’s appetite, and answered Leonard’s supplications for another star artist.
“When I heard him,” said producer Sam Phillips, “I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’ Then the Wolf came to the studio and he was about six foot six, with the biggest feet I’ve ever seen on a human being. Big Foot Chester is one name they used to call him. He would sit there with those feet planted wide apart, playing nothing but the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest sight you could see today would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what it would be worth to see the veins on his neck and, buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn soul.”
Also in May of 1951, at the same studio, B. B. King made his second recordings (his first had been three years earlier at a radio station). He’d left the Delta and become a prominent disc jockey in Memphis, where, seeking pointers, he met Muddy. “One of the things he told me then that I tell all the young musicians today: practice. He told me to be yourself, not to play for these people one way and these people another way, be they black or white. As great as I thought he was, he was very modest. I call him the godfather of the blues. He did more for the blues than most of us.”
Change was in the air. Jackie Brenston had released “Rocket 88” in May of 1951, its beat presaging rock and roll. Alan Freed went on the radio in July of the same year, calling himself Moondog and featuring artists such as Muddy, Wolf, and Brenston; he popularized the term “rock and roll,” and developed a white audience that liked the name. In Memphis, Dewey Phillips had, for three years, been playing these black artists back-to-back with whites, mixing bluegrass and blues, divining the feel beneath the rhythm and ignoring the industry’s categorizations. One of his most dedicated fans was a young listener by the name of Elvis Presley.
When “Still a Fool” left the national charts, “She Moves Me” ascended in its place. The other big sellers were Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years,” B. B. King’s “Three O’Clock Blues,” John Lee Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Give Me Central 209.” “At one time there was a wide gulf between the sophisticated big-city blues and rocking novelties waxed for the northern market, and the country or Delta blues that were popular in the southern regions,” Billboard wrote in March of 1952. “Gradually the two forms intermingled and the country blues tune [is] now dressed up in arrangements palatable to both northern and southern tastes.” Mainstream acceptance was first confirmed when major labels began jockeying for position. But it was the independents who better understood the business, and Chess Records, which had forged this new sound, was the leading independent. Establishing itself on Muddy’s back and using the demand for his records to shoehorn more of its releases into the marketplace, Chess had the industry in check.
The idea at the May 1952 session was to create an all-star band. Muddy had a marquee name, Jimmy had developed one, and if Little Walter could get a hit, they’d have a three-man front line. There’d been one session between “Still a Fool” and this one, at which Walter had failed to arrange for his own amp and had to play acoustically. This time, amps abounded, everyone was juiced. “We were sitting down [in the studio],” said Jimmy Rogers. “They would put a mike on the amp and a mike to the vocal. Sitting in a chair, we could see each other, and we’d play off each other in the studio, like we were on the stage. We would build it and then we would give a listen to the tape. Then we’d keep it running till we get the right sound we like.” Warming up with their theme song, they caught Leonard’s ear.
“At the time we called it the jam,” said Jimmy. “We’d do it coming on stage and during intermission we’d do a couple of verses and take a break.” Muddy or the others could address the audience, introduce band members or guests, make announcements, or generally clown around over a beat that would pique interest in the coming set, or make anyone think twice before hitting the door. (“If you couldn’t play that song, you couldn’t play harmonica,” said Jimmy Rogers. “They’d sit there all night to hear it, and we’d have harps singing up there on the street all the next day trying to do it.”) The jam that would become Little Walter’s classic “Juke” had no name. The give and take of the groove let everyone stretch out, and they’d pass the solo around like a pint bottle among friends. Jimmy and Walter could push their progressive ideas, while Muddy rooted the song with his slide. It brought out the best in all of them, especially Walter, curling his notes through the amplifier — and gradually the band let him take command of the tune.
Feeding his trademark quiver through the amplifier took Walter to another realm. “All my best records, I made them with the amplifier,” said Walter. “You can fill that harp with air. If you don’t, it’ll kill you. I can keep a whole lot of wind in that harp, I don’t have to do nothing but navigate with it then.”
Leonard leapt to the song. “He said, ‘What’s that?’ ” recalled Rogers. “He said, ‘Play that again.’ ” It struck Leonard the way it struck Muddy’s fans. “I could’ve had the song or Muddy, either one of us could have taken it,” Rogers recalled. “But we wanted Walter on record as well. We were trying to make an all-star unit out of the deal. And Leonard went for it.”
The harmonica kicks off the song with a short running riff, punctuated by a jazzy guitar strum; Jimmy’s influence is strong. In the middle section, Walter blows the riff big and fat, skronking like a horn, then retracts, changing the harp’s tone to the simpler country feel; he’s making taffy of the instrument. “Juke” shuffles and glides, it rolls and cajoles, brings a smile to listeners’ cake holes.
Among those who would end up smiling were the Three Deuces, a trio of kids still in their teens. Louis and Dave Myers had come to Chicago in the early 1930s, still kids and musically inclined. Playing a house party, they were introduced by some girls to a harmonica player their own age. “This kid was so small,” said Dave Myers. “He sit in with us, he could play all that Muddy Waters kind of stuff, and we clicked real good.” The kid’s name was Junior Wells, and he and Little Walter would soon switch places.
While readying Muddy’s next release, Leonard played an acetate of the instrumental in the Chess offices. The day was warm and he opened the door for a breeze. At the bus stop, a woman danced to the song. He played it again and she stayed, stamping her feet and doing the shimmy. There’s no higher test market than the street, and the song was rushed to release on August 6, 1952. On tour in the South, the band was between sets in a Shreveport, Louisiana, club when the song came on. Walter, recognizing his own harp — no one else played like that — rushed to the jukebox, saw the call number being played, traced it on the menu, and found his song, now titled “Juke,” by the band Little Walter and His Night Cats. The patrons played it several times in the course of the night, always dancing. Walter watched, listened, and set to ruminating. He phoned Chicago and spoke to his girlfriend, who told him the song was getting a big push on the radio from the major disc jockeys. Billboard also took immediate notice: “Little Walter flashes some nice harmonica work in fronting a fast instrumental. The Night Cats back him solidly.”
Still in Shreveport, the band went to get new outfits. They’d left Chicago’s cool summer unprepared for the swamps of Louisiana. “It was so hot down there that we got little stuff you could wear and rinse out, it’d be ready to go the next morning,” said Jimmy. They bought seersucker suits, short-sleeved eggshell-colored shirts, and beige pants. The tailor told them everything would be ready that afternoon. “When we got back to the hotel, oh man, the girl up at the desk said, ‘The little guy with the checkered hat on’ — that was Walter — ‘he said for you to take care of his amplifier. He had a terrific nosebleed, he’s goin’ back to Chicago.’ ”
It was true that Walter suffered nosebleeds, and the band worried for him. For the moment, however, there was nothing to do but book a saxophone player to finish the tour — no other harmonica player could command Walter’s big sounds. “We made out with him,” Rogers continued. “Picked stuff you could kind of handle pretty good to make the nights.”
Back in Chicago, Walter immediately powwowed with the Myers brothers. He was ready to walk away from Muddy’s old-fashioned slow stuff, jumping to bring in the new. When Muddy’s band returned, they found their harmonica player in good health, if a little bigheaded (he tried to get his share of the pay for the gigs he’d missed), and they resumed playing — for about a week. When Walter jumped from Muddy, Junior Wells jumped toward him. Muddy never missed a beat, and Walter gained one: the East Coast–based Shaw Artists Corporation, booking and promotion, opened a Chicago office and signed Little Walter to a five-year contract; the Aces became the Jukes. Walter’s debut single spent twenty weeks on the R&B charts, where it hit number one.
Junior Wells was grounded in the country and the city, traveling between his father in Arkansas and his mother in Chicago. As a child, he remembered visiting a place where he saw the people dancing wildly, heard the hollering, and told his mother he liked that blues joint. “She said, ‘You wasn’t at no blues joint, you was at a sanctified church.’ ”
Born December 9, 1934, he was raised in Marion, Arkansas, near West Memphis — a barefoot kid getting dusty with another future blues star, Junior Parker, the two jamming on twenty-five-cent Marine Band harmonicas they bought at the Rexall drugstore. Junior and guitarist Earl Hooker learned to please crowds on the Chicago streetcar, riding “from one end of the line to the other, takin’ up a little change from it. We had a guy played the tub with that rope broom for a bass.”
As a teenager, Junior tried to buy a harmonica at a Chicago pawn shop, but didn’t have enough money. He took the instrument anyway and tried to raise the difference by playing for spare change outside the store. The salesman had him arrested and Wells was taken to court. Muddy signed papers as his guardian. “The judge asked me to play the harp,” Wells said, “and when I did, the judge gave the salesman the fifty cents and hollered, ‘Case dismissed.’ ” Then Muddy took him outside and popped him on the forehead.
“I raised Junior Wells from about a kid,” said Muddy. “He was in my band. He was too young to be in the clubs. I had to be his guardian. I had to keep him down because first thing you know he’d wanna fight!” Spann worked Junior into the band, as he would for each successive member, harpist or otherwise, teaching the songs and Muddy’s way of toying with the beat. But harmonica players were especially close to Spann’s heart. “I figure the harmonica is the mother of the band,” he said. “Once you get a good harp lead off, you in business.” Junior was young and quick. Within a month of joining, he was in the studio. He was seventeen and played amplified harmonica like he’d been playing it for all his seventeen years. His screaming harp on “Standing Around Crying” is every bit as exciting as Walter’s playing. Junior pushes the amplified harmonica till it wails in pain, then pulls it softly to make it purr. There was soon an irony to the title. Out one weekend with the band, Junior scored a girl and took her back to the hotel after the gig. Muddy’s date had fallen through, and not long after Junior entered his room, Muddy knocked on his door. When Junior opened it, Muddy barged in, threw Junior out, and locked the door. Junior was left standing around crying.
Still, ladies would come and go, and Junior had no reason to leave the band. When the army drafted him on his eighteenth birthday, he ignored the notice and was carted off by military police. He went AWOL and had to be hauled back once again. “Every time we’d look around,” said Muddy, “two of them big mens there looking for him, and he used to run ’tween their legs.”
About three months after Little Walter’s defection, Jimmy signed his own deal with the Shaw agency. His singles weren’t as popular as Walter’s or Muddy’s, but as bandleader he was better paid. Steadfastly holding to his formula, Leonard tried to keep the core band together in the studio. “We was running in and out of town,” said Jimmy Rogers, “and sometimes we’d meet up in Chicago and get a chance to cut a session.” He continued to make club appearances with Muddy; when his own gigs conflicted, guitarist Eddie Taylor filled his role.
Muddy’s selflessness made his sidemen more satisfied while in his band, but it encouraged their solo aspirations, creating an instability in his lineup: someone was always thinking about going out on his own. Those who wanted independence would want it anyway, and Muddy, despite the repercussions and the personal pain, remained undeterred in sharing the spotlight with his band members. “If somebody can shine, put the light on them, let them shine. It makes a better feeling in the band. [But] it goes hard when you get used to one sound and you have to go and get into another one,” said Muddy. “See, we knew one another’s thing, and we had no trouble out of that. When it fell apart, it went hard.”