extracted from "Totally Shuffled: A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
May 31st
Muddy Waters-All Aboard-Fathers & Sons
Plenty of blues
musicians are called giants of the blues; many of them could rightly stake
claim to that title. It depends a lot on personal taste; for me, it has to be Blind
Willie McTell, but how could Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Howling Wolf,
Lightning Hopkins and many, many others be left out?
Whichever way you look at
it, Muddy Waters has to be up there with the rest of them.
Born in about
1913 (it’s all a bit sketchy), in Issaquena County, Mississippi. His mother
died when he was very young and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother.
A simple fact speaks volumes.
The shack that he was brought up in whilst he was
a youth on Stovall Plantation is now preserved at the Blues Museum in
Clarksdale, Mississippi. A shack. On a plantation.
In 1932 he married for the
first time-the blues guitarist Robert Nighthawk played at the wedding, which
was so wild that the floor fell in. In 1940 he moved to Chicago for a year or
so and played a bit of blues, but in 1941 he was back in Mississippi, running a
juke joint, complete with gambling, moonshine and a juke box. His break came
when he was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1941 and 1942 on one of Lomax’s trips to
the South. Muddy Waters finally moved to Chicago in 1943 and supported his
musical career for a while by driving trucks and working in a factory in the
day whilst performing at night. (Can you imagine many (any) of today’s rock
stars doing that?)
It can’t have been easy for Muddy-Big Bill Broonzy managed to get him some shows playing
in rowdy Chicago clubs and Muddy’s uncle gave him an electric guitar just so he
could be heard above the noise in the clubs. It took until 1947, and early
recordings for the Aristocrat label-which mutated into Chess- for him to strike
it big.
His band was
probably one of the best blues ensembles of all time; Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers
on guitar, Elga Edmonds (a.k.a. Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann
on piano. What a great band, and what fantastic records they made-“Hoochie
Coochie Man,” “I’m Ready” and “I Just Want To Make Love To You”, to name but
three. Little Walter soon broke out on his own but he remained close to Muddy
Waters. Rogers and Spann went onto have
successful solo careers from this start in Chicago, but Waters was the true
giant of blues in the city. Howling Wolf (another great star), had also moved
to Chicago and he had a good natured, friendly rivalry with Waters throughout.
Doesn’t it all sound special? Imagine living in Chicago in the 50’s and being
able to see both Muddy Waters and
Howling Wolf perform?
In that sense, I
was born too late- and in the wrong country. But I still can listen to records
like this, close my eyes and be transported across an ocean and half a century
away.
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