Can't Be Satisfied (12 page)

In his field notes, Lomax wrote that Muddy “plays at country balls two or three times to seven times a week. Fall the biggest time — plays mostly in the country and immediate
neighborhood. Private houses give the parties — two of us get $6 — the whole band gets $16 for a picnic or something like that.” (He also noted that Muddy “Just wasn’t
a hand to dance — sometimes you be dancing with a girl and people snatch her and go on so I just never did try to learn.”)

The evening concluded with an extensive listing of Muddy’s repertoire. Its range reflected his disparate audience — gutbucket blues (“I Be’s Troubled”), smoother
black pop songs (“St. Louis Blues”), white country-and-western numbers (“Deep in the Heart of Texas,” Gene Autry’s “Be Honest with Me”), waltzes
(“Missouri Waltz”), and the occasional pop pap (“Red Sails in the Sunset”).

The researchers devoted two full days between July 24 and 26 to recording Muddy and the band, and returned again on July 30. The sessions yielded five solo takes of Muddy, ten others that
featured him and some combination of the Son Sims Four, and one brief recorded Muddy interview. These sessions were recorded with high-grade
ribbon microphones. They are
quality field recordings that stand at a crossroads: Muddy is the intersection, old enough to have inherited the preblues, young enough to be involved in the creation of something new. Son Sims was
a graduate of square dances, where the band played standards such as “Turkey in the Straw,” “Leather Britches,” and “Arkansas Traveler.” Muddy’s music, on
the other hand, was imbued with passion and personality; in Muddy, the voice of individual expression was emerging.

Exactly one week before Christmas of 1942, on a Friday, McKinley Morganfield returned to the county clerk’s office in Clarksdale and bought another marriage license. The
signature line on his “Affidavit of Applicant” is distinguished by his X, around which Clerk J. N. Smith has written “his mark” and then spelled out “McKinley
Morganfield.”

After celebrating the engagement that weekend, Muddy, in a small ceremony on December 23, married Sallie Ann Adams, twenty-seven, formerly of Farrell (where she attended school through the sixth
grade) and recently of Stovall, Mississippi. A light-skinned woman, “she wasn’t small and wasn’t large, just twixt and between,” said Magnolia Hunter, who worked on Stovall
with Muddy. Sallie worked the field alongside Muddy and sometimes cooked hamburgers at the Stovall juke house while he played. He was twenty-nine years old, married again.

“I Be’s Troubled” and “Country Blues” were included in a six-album package issued by the Library of Congress in January of 1943. His songs were in
the album
Afro-American Blues and Game Songs,
alongside albums devoted to Anglo-American traditions, Bahamian songs, and recordings made of the Iroquois Indians. “This was the first
time that a government had ever published its sort of unwashed authentic folksingers on records,” Lomax wrote in
The Land Where the Blues Began.
Indeed, this collection, issued when
record companies still hid
their participation in “race” music, was a harbinger of the societal desegregation to come.

While Lomax was releasing these timeless songs rooted in tradition, pop radio was focusing on the issue of the day: World War II. America had entered the fray on December 8, 1941, and the home
front rallied to hits such as Kay Kyser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and Johnny Mercer’s “GI Jive.” Colonel Stovall, who’d become a flying
ace in the first war, reenlisted. His sons served in the Air Force too: William Howard Stovall IV was killed in action at the Battle of the Bulge. Plantations and farms, because they served the
country with their crops, were able to protect some of their workers from the draft; Muddy, already in his late twenties and thus not prime pickings, had yet to be called up.

On January 23, 1943, Muddy had someone sign his name to another form sent by Alan Lomax acknowledging receipt of two copies of “Record 18 in Album IV of
Folk Music of the United States
from Records in the Archive of American Folk Song
(1942).” There was no mention of the payment, but Muddy remembered receiving a twenty-dollar check. “It would have taken me, well,
how long to make twenty dollars if I worked five days for three dollars, seventy-five cents? That’s good money, twenty dollars. I was a big recording star.” He had no pictures made with
either of his wives, but when his record arrived, he put on his best suit and carried it to a photographer’s studio, where he was photographed holding the love of his life. He put the other
copy on the jukebox at Will McComb’s cafe, located nearby on Highway Number One between his house and Farrell. “I carried that record up the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just
played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ ”

Before the jukebox and way before blues radio, the way a person played a particular song could reveal the town or plantation where they’d learned it. Musical styles — indeed whole
cultures — had been quarantined. Itinerant musicians, like birds dropping seeds, carried songs and styles; music was a communal experience shared through live performance, and techniques were
exchanged through personal interaction. The popularization of recordings as a medium
broadened the listener’s horizon of experience; standing before a jukebox, one could
be exposed to twenty different artists and styles, and a week later, twenty more. (Recordings also etched a permanence to lyrics that had previously been mutable, introducing sticky issues of
authorship.) Regionalistic traits began a slow melt into the national pool. As always, technology proved a mixed blessing. This was true when it came to music and when it came to the fields. The
recent roar of the tractor had already killed off the field holler. Researching his doctoral thesis in Coahoma County in 1941, Fisk graduate student Samuel Adams found that

Muddy, too, was keenly aware of the machines. The mechanical cotton picker, long rumored in development, was being publicly tested for the first time just down the road from Stovall on the
Hopson Plantation. The machine was ready to take the jobs of men and would be much more tolerant of the long hours and verbal abuse. Three years had passed since Muddy saw St. Louis. The billowing
factories strong in his memory, he couldn’t help but see the tufts of smoke blown by the Delta’s newest device as evermore threatening.

People went north not only because work was available, but also because work at home was diminishing. Northern industrial employment opportunities had increased with foreign munitions orders,
and the employment pool had been drained by the demand for soldiers. The big city’s gravitational pull was strengthening. Robert
Nighthawk had already left the Delta for
Chicago, and his “Prowling Night-Hawk” had come out in 1937. Robert Lockwood’s “Black Spider Blues” came out in 1941. Tommy McClennan had been recording since 1939 and
had a hit with “Bluebird Blues” in 1942. Muddy started 1943 with a twenty-dollar boost. He had records on a jukebox. Letters from his uncle Joe and cousin Dan spoke of the opportunities
in Chicago. His first wife was making it up there.

But the draw at Stovall remained powerful. When John Work returned in June of 1943 for further research, he heard Muddy perform at the Colonel’s home; perhaps one of the military men was
home on a visit. “I remember them setting up the Japanese lanterns,” said Colonel Stovall’s son Bobby, “and the band setting up on the porch.” According to
Bobby’s sister Marie Stovall Webster, “We used to hear the music from the honky-tonk in our house across from the gin on Saturday nights. And my grandmother played lots of Negro
spirituals on the Victrola. My mother and father had grown up with Handy’s music, and my father [the Colonel] loved Mahalia Jackson. He did not look down on black music at all.”

John Work spent much time with Muddy in 1943: “Muddy Water . . . explains that it is necessary to use two different repertoires to accommodate the demands of white and Negro dancers. The
white dancers prefer tunes more akin to the old reels than to the blues, although the ‘St. Louis Blues’ is a great favorite among them. . . . For the colored dancers, Morganfield must
play blues and music which stem from them, such as ‘Number Thirteen Highway’ and ‘I’m Goin’ Down Slow’ — his current favorite pieces. Muddy Water would
like to join the church but to do so would mean to abandon his guitar — a sacrifice too dear to make.”

But sacrifices were in Muddy’s future.

In the absence of the Stovalls from their farm, the feel and conditions had changed. It was, anyway, a period of turmoil: the mules, which had driven the plantation since its inception, were
being sold off and replaced by tractors; Captain Holt, the longtime overseer, quit or was fired by the recently hired plantation general manager, the trim, brown-haired Mr. T. O. Fulton. The man
Fulton hired as a
replacement, Ellis Rhett, “was kind of mean,” Stovall resident Manuel Jackson remembered, citing an instance where Rhett had whipped another
field hand with a bridle. According to Bobby Stovall, “Mr. Rhett was the kind of guy that gave the South a bad name. There was a lot of old school about him. He was not user-friendly for
black people.” (When Colonel Stovall returned in the summer of 1945 to an upset farm and unhappy tenants, he fired Fulton and Rhett immediately.)

Muddy was making twenty-two and a half cents an hour for driving the tractor. “I was doing the same thing,” Muddy said, “his top men was doing for twenty-seven cents an
hour.” One summer day in 1943, Muddy asked Rhett to raise him to a quarter. “[Rhett] says I’m the only man ever ask him for a raise,” Muddy said, “and if I don’t
want to work for what I’m working for, get down off his tractor — leave it setting on the road, don’t take it to the barn, don’t take it to the shop. He came on like that
three times, and when he was coming on, my mind was making up like this: Ain’t but one thing to do — he’d never like me no more and I’d never like him no more — kiss
him good-bye.”

According to the Reverend Myles Long, who was baling alfalfa hay with Muddy that day, “Muddy wasn’t too hard to get along with. We worked in the field together. That particular
evening, we pulled under a shade tree to rest. I didn’t know what he [and Rhett] was fighting about, but I saw Muddy start to walking.”

“Muddy got off,” said Jackson, “walked away from there, and I didn’t see him until he come back with his band from Chicago.”

“His grandmother told him it was time to go,” Muddy’s last wife, Marva, remembered Muddy explaining. She knew how hard an overseer could make it on a field hand, and she
worried for her grandson’s safety. Muddy’s friend Bo, who had recently been drafted, had one pair of good clothes that he wouldn’t need in the army; he gave them to Muddy for
Chicago. Two days after the confrontation, Muddy caught an afternoon train carrying a suit of clothes and an acoustic Sears Silvertone guitar. He left Sallie Ann behind, again not bothering,
apparently, with a divorce; she moved back to Farrell.