Can't Be Satisfied (9 page)

The idea for the 1941 and 1942 expeditions — in which the recorded subjects would also include Son House, Honeyboy Edwards, Willie Brown, Fiddling Joe Martin, and Son Sims — began
with Professor John Wesley Work III, a member of the music department at Fisk University, a prestigious black school in Nashville. For several generations, John Work’s family had been in
Nashville’s community of black professionals. His father, also something of a folklorist, had been responsible for resurrecting the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the mid-1890s, presenting to
America an African American alternative to minstrelsy and blackface.

Work was skilled at operating Fisk’s Presto (Model D) portable disc recorder and had already made field recordings around Nashville. His philosophy, he explained in a speech at Fisk, was
“that in
each of your communities there is an abundance of significant folklore of which you have been generally unaware but which can easily be discovered and usually
made available for the community’s appreciation and education.” In May of 1940, he realized the importance of a recording trip to Natchez, Mississippi, where a fire the previous month
had killed two hundred black patrons of the Rhythm Night Club. “I would like very much to have the opportunity of collecting songs in that area next spring,” he proposed to Fisk’s
president. “At that time, the anniversary of that fire, there undoubted will be many folk expressions and memorials. . . . To the abundance of folklore natural to the community, a new body of
lore is due to be added. It is the ballads and music arising out of the holocaust of last April.”

Searching for funds to finance the trip, Fisk contacted the Library of Congress. Their Archive of American Folk Song, in the person of folklorist Alan Lomax, recognized the strength of the
project and agreed to collaborate. Lomax was himself the son of a folklorist, John Lomax — a ranging collector for the Archive, with which he’d been associated since soon after its
founding in 1928. Alan became the Archive’s first full-time employee in 1937. Work’s study jibed with the Lomax family’s perception of “folklore,” a more malleable
notion than the reigning tradition in which the oldest songs — dating prior to the Industrial Revolution (indeed prior to the printing press) and unchanged by time — were considered
purest; Alan and his father believed that the living folk and their input were as vital as the original source of the material.

The Lomax family hailed from Austin, Texas, where a young Alan had witnessed subcultures of cowboys, Indians, and Hispanic people existing along with, but separate from, the affluent white
society. In 1921, at the age of six, Alan started traveling with his father and in 1933 began assisting him with Library of Congress field expeditions. They used a portable disc recorder,
documenting Texas cowboys, Louisiana Cajuns, Kentucky hillbillies, and Mississippi chain-gang singers. (The relative meaning of “portable” was evident in the machine’s weight of
several hundred pounds.)

By the time Fisk and the Library of Congress worked out their
partnership, they’d shifted the site to Clarksdale, Mississippi — all of Coahoma County —
the nation’s densest concentration of African Americans and the largest town in the Mississippi Delta. The goals of the joint field trip were summarized by Alan Lomax in a 1941 Library of
Congress report: “The agreed-upon study was to explore objectively and exhaustively the musical habits of a single Negro community in the Delta, to find out and describe the function of music
in the community, to ascertain the history of music in the community, and to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community.”

Lomax and Work arrived in Coahoma County late in the evening on Thursday, August 28, 1941. “Everywhere we went,” Alan Lomax wrote to a friend, “we were asked point-blank, were
we or were we not union organizers.” With World War II looming and the North’s factory work heating up, and with the threat of mechanized farming ever greater in the South, the Great
Migration was achieving epic proportions. Farmers were afraid of losing their help before they could afford the technology that would replace them. And the prospect of their workforce organizing
induced panic and resentment.

Since churches were easier to find than blues singers — they were less mobile and more sober — Lomax and Work began recording services, and inquired after blues singers in the style
of Robert Johnson. One name kept coming up.

On Sunday the thirty-first, Lomax and Work arrived early and unannounced on the Stovall Plantation. They sought Captain Holt, the friendly, pipe-smoking overseer, and gained permission to mix
with the black population, especially one “Muddy Water.” The singer, suspicious of being busted by a conniving moonshiner, came to the commissary before this stranger could find him at
home. The trust between them was established by Lomax’s guitar, sealed with a whiskey, and then Lomax began setting up the equipment that Muddy had helped bring in. Lomax did not like for
Work to handle the equipment. Son Sims had appeared by the time the bottle was being uncorked, and he accompanied Muddy on their original song
“Burr Clover Blues”
so recording levels could be set. While Lomax made final adjustments with the knobs, John Work conducted a brief interview with the two musicians. Asked to state their names, Muddy identified
himself as “Name McKinley Morganfield, nickname Muddy Water,” then added, “Stovall’s famous guitar picker.”

And so, on August 31, 1941, after lunch and before supper, Muddy Waters recorded one of the songs for which he was known in his neck of the Delta and for which he would later become known
throughout the world. “Country Blues” was the name Lomax appended to it; “I Feel Like Going Home” was the title in John Work’s notes and the title when it took Chicago
by storm a few years later. These first recordings were quite different from the electric versions Muddy would later record. They were about the marriage of acoustic space created by the human
voice and a wooden guitar. “You get more pure thing out of an acoustic,” Muddy later reflected. “I prefer an acoustic.” The power in Muddy’s playing is comparable to
the way a blade cuts rows into a field; his music is informed and defined by the immediacy of touching a string and the knowledge of how it affects the air around it.

It’s a great performance, Muddy alone, singing and playing guitar. Unlike the emotional desperation of Robert Johnson, Muddy conveys power, the physicality of a human being worked by the
system. In the voice of Robert Johnson, we hear the man who played hooky from fieldwork. In Muddy’s voice, we hear — we feel — the field, the plow, the dirt. “Country
Blues” begins with high notes and tumbles low, inviting us in. The melody is instantly familiar; it was the basis of Son House’s “My Black Mama,” the same song that inspired
Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues.” By picking some notes and simultaneously sliding along the neck with the bottleneck over his pinky, Muddy sounds like two people. He gives
the song a rhythmic bounce, pinging a high note at the end of a line for emphasis. It’s not a boogie, it’s a slow number, but we can hear someone’s hip cocked north at a juke
house, and the sound that hip makes when it swings south, riding the sharp
ping
like an undulating whip about to crack.

The song evokes both the beauty and futility of the field hand’s
struggle to survive. Comfort is found in the warmth of a lover’s body (“I feel like
blowing my horn”), and her absence leaves a loneliness as big as the rural sky:

After Muddy completed “Country Blues,” the recording captured him leaning back in his chair, a creaking, and then a bassy rumbling that becomes recognizable: footsteps crossing a
wooden floor. It was Lomax, not stopping until he was right next to Muddy; he was speaking into the microphone when he said, “I wonder if you can tell me, if you can remember, when it was
that you made that blues, Muddy Water?”

Muddy answered straight away, a bit anxious and almost stepping on Lomax’s question. “I made that blues up in thirty-eight.”

“Do you remember the time of the year?”

“I made it up about the eighth of October in thirty-eight.” Muddy clustered his words together, with a halting nervousness between them.

Lomax inquired in a comfortable, almost intimate voice. By this point, he, Work, and Muddy had been together several hours, during which Muddy had seen this untold dream unfold and assemble
itself in his very living room. Lomax, realizing he could capture Muddy while this mood still hung, got close and casual.

“I remember thinking how low-key Morganfield was, grave even to the point of shyness,” Lomax wrote in his field notes. “But I was bowled over by his
artistry. There was nothing uncertain about his performances. He sang and played with such finesse, with such a mercurial and sensitive relation between voice and guitar and he expressed so much
tenderness in the way he handled his lyrics that he went right beyond all his predecessors — Blind Lemon, [Charlie] Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown. His own pieces were
more than blues, they were love songs of the Deep South, gently erotic and deeply sentimental.”

Lomax’s questions continued: “Do you remember where you were when you were doing your singing, how it happened —”

“— No I —”

“No I mean, where you were sitting, what you were thinking about?”

“I was fixing the punction [puncture] on a car, and I had been mistreated by a girl and it looked like that run in my mind to sing that song.”

“Tell me a little of the story of it if you don’t mind, if it’s not too personal. I want to know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. It’s a very
beautiful song.”

This white man complimented the field hand, and he answered like an artist: “Well I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind, come to me just like that song and I started to sing and
went on with it.”

Muddy may not have been in the boisterous voice he’d have when frying Saturday fish sandwiches and laughing with friends, but he was loosening up. Things were working out.

Muddy interrupted to answer, a bold action. But he’d been complimented, appreciated. And he may have been aware that the lathe was still cutting — cutting his very words into the
acetate posterity of forever, and he probably wanted this white man from far away to know this music was important to him. Muddy appreciated the value, the impact, of recording. These two men, one
comfortable in New York museums and the other among animal traps in muddy fields, were the objects of each other’s desires; each was helping the other achieve his goal.

“Yassir,” Muddy continued, “I knew the tune before I heard it on the record.” Then he told Lomax a little about Son House.

What a field day for Work and Lomax. At this, their first interview, they found a man who could not only take them back to Charlie Patton’s world when the blues were an unformed, swirling
mass about to come together like a tornado across the flat Delta jungle, but also could play in a style that indicated the music’s future. If they’d found Son House first, they’d
have gotten a sense of the past and present, but his style was fully evolved and would remain the same for life. In Muddy Waters they found the perfect crux, the living breathing Mississippi Delta
musical zeitgeist.