Can't Be Satisfied (50 page)

I
NTRODUCTION

xiii
“They done found out I’m sellin’ whiskey”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy
Waters.”

xiii
“I went there, I said, ‘Yassuh?’ ”: Ibid.

xiii
“I couldn’t figure it out”: Ibid.

xiii
“I couldn’t handle this white man”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

xiii
“Same cup I drink out of”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
pp. 234–235.

xiv
“He brought his machine”: Ibid., p. 234.

xv
“We got his stuff out of the trunk”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”

xv
“So I just went along”: Jones,
Melody Maker.

xv
“When he played back the first song”: Palmer, “The Delta Sun.”

xv
“Man, I can sing”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.

xviii
“I wanted to get out of Mississippi”: Guralnick,
Home,
p. 67.

xix
“I been in the blues all of my life”: Harris, Liner notes to Otis Spann’s
Bottom of the
Blues.

1: M
ANNISH
B
OY
1913–1925

Muddy’s Father:
Ollie Morganfield and Berta Grant never married. Ollie’s first wife was named Sissy, and their son was Freddy. Ollie later married Gertrude Crayton
and had ten more children: Dave, Ollie Jr., Robert, Matthew, and Ellis were the boys; Luella, Mary, Gertrude, Fannie, and Annie were the girls. “He sharecropped and leased on Magnolia
Plantation till 1947, then he moved closer to Rolling Fork,” Robert Morganfield told me. “When he retired, he was renting somebody else’s land and farming cotton on it.”
Muddy has been quoted as saying he was born on the Kroger Plantation. The interviewer probably misunderstood Muddy:
Kroger
was the name of the farm manager on the Magnolia Plantation.

The “long-lived resident” mentioned on page 3 was named Beulah Richardson, whom I met while knocking on doors looking for old people near Jug’s Corner. In 1933, Beulah
Richardson hired Ollie to play a Christmas breakfast at her home. She’d killed hogs, prepared meats, made sausages, and was fortified with “whiskey on up.” The party would have
been a smash, with Ollie taking home five or six dollars, had she not stayed out the night before carousing and riding in a convertible. “I had pneumonia by morning. The doctor came and saw
all that food, said, ‘Someone’s going to have to fix me something to eat.’ And he sat and ate before he tended to me.” She had no memory of Muddy’s mother or
grandmother.

Stovall Plantation, and Cotton:
Stovall was — and is — a 4,500-acre plantation; it’s actually the Belmont, Waterloo, Prairie, and West End plantations
combined. That’s a substantial territory, with its own mule barn, hay barn, dairy barn, and a blacksmith shop the size of a barn. It sits on Oak Ridge, next to the Mississippi River, and
follows the bank of the Little Sunflower River, a flood stream. The Stovall land nearer the river is some of the Delta’s finest.

During high water, flood streams take the Mississippi’s water — and all its silt, sand, and collected topsoil — and dump it on the high bank. The water drains away from the
flood stream to a drainage stream; the heavy sandy soil is dumped first, and the finer silt is carried further. Sandy loam (the ice cream soil) produces the best cotton; the heavier soil is called
buckshot, so named because its clay content makes pellets hard enough to shoot. (At the time of the great flood of 1927, rows had been cut into the fields by mules. A flood in 1995 carried away
much of the sandy topsoil, and the rows in the buckshot ground from 1927, and the mule tracks, were still evident.)

Stovall was timberland when originally settled by Colonel John Oldham in the 1840s. The Choctaw had cleared one area and were raising corn, and they cleared a track nearby for pony races. Oldham
named his farm Prairie Plantation. When his great-grandson-in-law, Colonel William Howard Stovall, inherited the land around the time Muddy and his grandmother arrived, the Stovall Plantation had
grown to its full size. In a 1930 aerial photograph of Stovall, the oval shape of the
pony track is still evident in the fields. (“Neither my daddy or grandmother sold
off or bought much property,” said Bobby Stovall, who was raised there.)

“My daddy used to ride a horse all over the plantation, he never rode a truck,” Marie Stovall Webster said about Colonel Stovall. “He’d be out till at least seven
o’clock at night.” Some people have reported that signals on Mississippi plantations were sent across fields by blowing on conch shells, but Bobby Stovall found that laughable.
“Signals like that would have been given with a cow’s horn. They were also used in fox hunts, and for cows. Most everyone I knew could blow one. Where the fuck are they going to find a
conch shell in the Mississippi Delta?”

Over time, mechanization increased. In addition to the technological advancements, the transition from hand labor was also influenced by the enforcement of minimum wage in the Delta.
“After that, you couldn’t afford to chop cotton,” said Norma Weiland, today’s office manager at Stovall Farms. “When you were paying thirty cents an hour, it was a lot
different than when you were paying two and three dollars an hour. You could pay the children lesser wages and the minute they changed all that, the children ended up being left at home. The farmer
could not afford it. Farmers had to take advantage of the technology to stay in business.”

Pete Hunter, Stovall’s contemporary farm manager, explained, “It gradually transformed from sharecropping to where the farm had all the mules, harnesses, etcetera, kept them in one
area, and these people were paid so much a day or an hour. I can remember during the midfifties, in the era of tractors, a person hoeing or chopping cotton was paid two dollars a day, and a person
driving a tractor was paid four dollars a day. Money was paid in cash out the window of a pickup at the end of the day.”

Norma continued, “Everyone says farmers are the biggest gamblers of all. I’m not sure they’re not the biggest fools of all. If you were going to put a pencil to it, no way
would you invest the amount of money it takes to grow a crop with the hope of a return so little. Why do people farm? It provides them with a way of life. It gets in your blood, you have to watch
things grow.”

It’s said to be just coincidental that 1916 was the year of both Mississippi’s first boll weevil infestation and the inauguration of infamous, racist governor Theodore G. Bilbo.

4
Born October 20, 1890: This date comes from a military ID issued to Ollie in 1961. For the 1920 census, taken in April, Ollie listed his
age at his last birthday as twenty-eight, indicating a birth year of 1891.

4
There is no record of Berta: Berta Grant has been virtually erased from history. When researching her, I also tried other names
associated with the Grant family: Preece (and its various spellings) and Jones.

4
April 4, 1913: According to the 1940 census, John Work’s treatise (Fisk Archives), Alan Lomax’s notes (Lomax Archives), and
the Lewis Jones manuscript (Fisk Archives), Muddy’s birth year was 1913.

4
at least twelve years old: Assuming the age of childbearing begins at twelve, if Berta were born to a twelve-year-old Della, she was
twenty when she had Muddy; if Berta was twelve when she conceived Muddy, she was born in 1901.

4
McKinley A. Morganfield: Middle initial per Lomax correspondence, January 27, 1942, though I’ve never seen the initial used
anywhere else.

6
The Delta had been a swampy jungle: Joe Willie Wilkins said that one night, while his father was out playing
music, he and his mother were “home alone when a panther smelled food cooking and tried to enter the house through the cat entrance in the door. He could only get a paw in; Mrs. Wilkins cut
it off with an axe.” (Hay, “Wilkins,” p. 8.)

6
three sons: Ollie’s brother Lewis Morganfield wound up on Stovall; he became a preacher, and raised a family there and later in
Clarksdale. Eddie Morganfield died before he was thirty. “He was happy-go-lucky,” said his nephew Elve.

7
less weight equals less pay: Each cotton sack is weighed at day’s end and then emptied into a cotton house, a shed on wheels that
shuttles between the field and the gin. A 500-pound bale requires 1,300 pounds of boll. The seed accounts for the difference. It takes a lot of seedless cotton to create some weight.

8
A plantation was a privately owned small town: Not that the black people living in Mississippi’s towns were any better treated.
Blues musician Johnny Shines summed it up: “Down South, it was open season on black folk. Kill ’em anywhere you see ’em.” (
Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl,
produced and directed by Peter Meyer.)

8
“brozine”: Many plantations used their own scrip, a tender good only at their plantation store. Among the items available
there — at prices set above market value — were kitchen staples such as flour and lard, basic hunting and fishing supplies, and coal oil, clothes, stick candy, and hair
straighteners.

9
“she furnished for me and my uncle”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.

10
“I never did see my dad”: Welding, “An Interview.”

10
People grew what they ate: “We had our own horses, mules, cows, goats, and chickens, and I watered ’em from the time I was
a kid,” Muddy told Robert Palmer in
Deep Blues
(p. 100). “I had to pump the water, and that pump would put blisters in my hand. Even for one cow, you got to pump a lot of
water. She’d take two draws out of those big tubs and that’d be it.”

12
“I started early on, burning corn stumps”: Wyler and Ragsdale interview with Muddy Waters.

13
“they didn’t give you too much schooling”: Oliver,
Conversation,
p. 30.

13
Reverend Willie Morganfield: Lewis Morganfield’s seventh son was Willie Morganfield, who, along with two of his brothers,
followed his father into preaching. And, like his first cousin, the Reverend Willie Morganfield also became a singer, though his million-selling hits were gospel, not blues. “What Is
This,” recorded for Jewel Records in 1959 (a company run by friends of the Chess brothers), is perhaps his best-known recording, although many of his songs and sermons remain in print. He was
born on Stovall and was raised there and in Clarksdale, moved away in 1945, and returned in 1975. He has lived in bigger and smaller cities, preached from some of the nation’s largest
pulpits, and is currently pastor at Clarksdale’s Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church. He spoke from behind the desk of his church office, a basement room adorned with plaques, letters of
commendation, and gold records. He has had three heart attacks and continues to smoke heavily.

14
The blues began taking shape: The blending of the African American and Scots traditions explains the plethora of
lyrics and melodies common to both blues and bluegrass. For more information, see Tom Mazzolini’s “A Conversation with Paul Oliver” in
Living Blues.

14
the lyrical shape of AAB: John Work’s unpublished manuscript includes this note about the AAB lyrical structure:

14
“delay singer”: Palmer,
Deep Blues,
p. 102.

14
The earliest description of blues: Peabody, “Notes on Negro Music,” p. 149.