Muddy Waters

Excerpt from The Birth of Loud, by Ian S. Port:

A while later, Muddy found himself inside a downtown recording studio, where the people in charge, a well-to-do white lady and a foul-mouthed Jewish man, asked him to do a song or two of his own. Muddy agreed. With his amp turned up so loud that his strings cackled through its speaker, Muddy sang that old slow blues from the Mississippi Delta.

He gave himself over to the words, conjuring the distraught tremble that killed in a club: “Well, brooks run into the ocean and the ocean run into the sea / If I don’t find my baby, somebody gon’ sure bury me.”

“What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” said the Jewish man in the control room, a club owner named Leonard Chess. Here was just a signer and an electric guitar, backed by an upright bass. Chess was laughing skeptically, shaking his head. “Who the fuck is going to buy that?”

Chess’s partner, Evelyn Aron, hadn’t heard this music before, either. But she liked it. “You’d be surprised who’d buy that,” she told him.

Aristocrat Records pressed up three thousand copies of release 1305, “I Can’t be Satisfied” backed with “I Feel Like Going Home,” performed by Muddy Waters. The ten-inch, 78 RPM platters went out to corner stores and beauty parlors around Chicago one Friday. By the next day afternoon, every one of them was gone. People snapped them up so quickly that Muddy could find only a single copy.

A critic for Billboard heard the record. “Poor recording distorts vocal and steel guitar backing,” was the assessment. But it wasn’t the recording that had distorted the guitar—it was the overdriven amplifier that gave it that thick, worried tone. Muddy’s electric guitar and amplifier had begun to transform the Mississippi Delta blues, the country blues, into the electric blues. “I Feel Like Going Home” reached no. 11 on the national Billboard charts—a feat that neither Muddy Waters nor Leonard Chess would have dreamed of.

In the dub, performing with another guitar, a harmonica, and drums, Muddy’s music reached its full power. Yet Chess (who soon assumed total control over Aristocrat and renamed it Chess Records) refused to bring Muddy’s full group into the studio, seeing no reason to mess with a successful formula. Muddy, seeing the reactions of crowds in clubs night after night, hankered to capture the potency of his new electric blues, though, and finally went renegade to do it.

In a covert session for the Regal label, Muddy Waters and his band made an astounding document. “Ludella” featured the frontline of his club band – Muddy on lead guitar, Jimmy Rogers on vocals and their harp player, the explosive genius Little Walter, filling in. Drums and bass came in behind the three of them, laying down a heavy, rolling, medium-tempo beat. From the very start, Muddy was all over his guitar, bending notes in ecstatic agony, keeping his overdriven amplifier growling. When Little Walter cried through his harmonica, Rogers moaned about a woman sneaking around, a woman who “just won’t get along.” The intensity, the sheer heaviness of the performance, was devastating. It was 1949. “Rock n’ roll” as such was still years away. But there was no other word for it: the song absolutely rocked.

More hits came, and by the early fifties, Muddy’s electric music had a hold on Chicago. “They even named it the Muddy Waters blues,” a contemporary remembered. Muddy hadn’t been the first to play blues sons on an electrified guitar, of course, but his band was “the first to use amplification to make their ensemble music rawer, more ferocious, more physical, instead of simply making it a little louder,” the critic Robert Palmer would later write. Muddy was taking music to new realms of expression and power through the electric guitar. One of his bigger hits was a song called “Rollin’ Stone.” The revolution was under way.