| Hello John, This is a part II of the Rolling Stone article from 1983. You can never get enough of Muddy. I really got into him when I found the Johnny Winter produced albums from the early '80s. How can you resist listening to a title called "Hard Again"? This the skimpiest Out & About I can remember. I'm still in FB jail and will probably open a new page tomorrow. Sorry if I missed anyone. Get out an getcha some. Have a week!! Jim Crawford Phoenix Blues Society phoenixblues.org/ |
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COLD SHOTT and The Hurricane Horns www.coldshott.com The Sugar Thieves www.sugarthieves.com Gary Zak & The Outbacks www.outbackbluesband.com Eric Ramsey https://www.ericramsey.net/
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OUT & ABOUT Tuesday, April 12 Blues Review Band, 6:30 p.m., JT’s Copper Penny Bar, Sun City Gypsy & Hooter’s Blues JAM, 6 p.m., Pho Cao, Scottsdale Wednesday April 13 Tool Shed JAM, 7 p.m, Blooze Bar, Phoenix Johnny Miller JAM, 7 p.m., Coop’s, Glendale Thursday, April 14 Garvin FM, 5 p.m., Gold Stallion, Gold Canyon Hans Olson, 6 p.m., Handlebar Pub, Apache Junction Friday, April 15 Sugar Thieves, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Leon J, 12 p.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Saturday, April 16 Cold Shott & The “Hurricane Horns, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Sugar Thieves Duo, 6 p.m., Hyatt Regency, Scottsdale JC & The Rockers, 7 p.m., Handlebar Pub, Apache Junction Leon J, 12:30 p.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Sunday, April 17 Leon J, 12:30 p.m., DA Ranch, Cornvile Monday, April 18 Hans Olson, 7 p.m., Time Out Lounge (Every Monday), Tempe
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Hoochie Coochie Man
by Robert Palmer
Muddy Waters would be remembered as a vocal artist of astonishing depth and power if he had never touched a guitar. But with the neck of a whiskey bottle or, later, a length of metal tubing on his finger, he was able to make his guitar sing, too. A close listen to one of his dramatic slide-guitar solos– –on the Chess hit “Honey Bee,” for example –– reveals an extraordinary precision and emotional richness. He gave each note a specific weight, bending or flattening it as the emotional import and melodic contour of the musical situation required. For Muddy Waters, the blues were a specific art, an art of emotional and musical exactitude. Each of his songs, whether he wrote it, forged it from traditional elements or learned it from his friend and fellow blues tunesmith Willie Dixon, meant something. And he’d convey a song’s particular meaning with all the subtleties at his command –– shaping a note just so, insinuating the slightest delay into the way he turned a phrase, coloring this word with a lupine growl and that one with a graveyard moan. THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM REGARDING Muddy Waters is that he learned blues in the back country, brought his down-home blues to the city and added electricity and a solid backbeat, thereby laying the groundwork for rock & roll. His story began in Rolling Fork, in the Southern Mississippi Delta near Highway 61, where he was born on April 4th, 1915. His parents separated when he was six months old, and his grandmother took him north to live with her on the Stovall Plantation, in the rich cotton lands near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where John Lee Hooker and many other future blues stars grew to maturity. As a youngster, Muddy took up the harmonica, and that was the instrument, he played when he began performing at country suppers and picnics in his early teens. But the guitar and the music that men like Son House and Robert Johnson were making with it soon claimed his attention. His formal education had stopped at about the third grade; he never cared for such plantation jobs as driving plow mules, drawing water and chopping cotton, and at age seventeen, he sold a horse to get the money– – about two dollars and fifty cents – –to buy his first guitar, a Stella, from Sears and Roebuck in Chicago. By 1941, when Alan Lomax showed up in Clarksdale and recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress, Muddy was the most powerful and widely esteemed guitarist in his part of the Delta. Lomax returned in 1942 and recorded Muddy again, but these recordings were for the library’s archives, and Muddy wanted to hear his records on jukeboxes. In 1943, he left Mississippi for Chicago, and though friends told him his down-home blues wouldn’t be popular there, he was soon playing at house parties and South Side taverns where the noise level necessitated his switch from acoustic to electric guitar. Muddy bought his first electric guitar in 1944, and by 1946, he was gigging regularly with Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter. By 1949, Muddy and his band –– which by then included, along with Rogers and Jacobs, Baby Face Leroy Foster doubling on guitar and drums –– were packing in crowds at the Du Drop Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, and also recording for Aristocrat Records, a small Jazz and R & B label whose owners included two Polish-born Jews named Leonard and Phil Chess. When the Chess brothers bought out a partner and changed the name of their label to Chess, Muddy’s “Rollin’ Stone” was their first release. During the early Fifties, his blues hits – –”Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Just Make Love to Me,” “Louisiana Blues,” “Long Distance Call,” “She Moves Me” and the rest – –made him a hero to black fans throughout the South and in all the Midwestern and Northern cities where the population had swelled from Southern migration. In 1958, he played the first electric blues heard in England and launched a rhythm & blues movement that gave birth to groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1960, he introduced young white America to his music, especially “Got My Mojo Working,” the showstopper that would be associated with him from then on. This often-repeated story is perfectly true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The Muddy Waters we read about in books and magazines is still a part of our lives, and we are fortunate indeed that his music endures on records –– from the brash, strapping blues of his youth (which so influenced such later white blues aficionados as Paul Butterfield and Michael Bloomfield), through his Fifties hits (collected on a splendid recent reissue, Rolling Stone, from the reactivated Chess label), to his Blue Sky albums of the late Seventies. But the real flesh-and-blood Muddy Waters, the man who kept his feet on the ground and his hands in the dirt, even as his music touched the sky –– that Muddy Waters is gone now. But let’s avoid tears and regrets. Let’s play his records, and enjoy the life we’re living, because Muddy enjoyed his life to the fullest. It’s true that he never grew rich from his music, but he worked as often as he wanted and was well paid when he did. He lived comfortably in his two-story frame house in the suburbs, bouncing grandchildren on his knee, drinking fine champagne and frying shrimp and other delicacies seasoned with peppers and herbs from his own garden. He talked on the telephone to admirers who called from near and far, spinning tales of mojo bands, Delta wanderings and big-city tavern brawls. That’s how he passed the time during the months before his death –– “enjoying the fruits of his labor,” as his manager, Scott Cameron, put it. “This is the best point of my life,” Muddy told me five years ago, when he was still working most of the year, before he was able to coast a bit on his success. “I’m glad it came before I died, I can tell you. Feels great.” There’s no reason to think he felt differently during his last day on earth, before he died quietly, of heart failure, in his sleep. He is survived by his wife, Marva, a son, three daughters, a stepson and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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