Local author Robert Gordon was a year removed from his first book,
the local music history It Came From
Memphis, and preparing to start a new one about a bookie when the biggest project of his career came and
found him. Likely due to a suggestion by friend, mentor, and renowned
roots-music chronicler Peter Guralnick, publishing house Little, Brown
approached Gordon about doing a biography of blues legend Muddy
Waters. Gordon thought it sounded like a good way to spend a couple of years.
But he underestimated a little bit. Five years, three editors, and two children
later, Gordon’s book, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy
Waters, is finally seeing the light of day.
Richly detailed and researched, written in a voice both scholarly and accessible,
and copiously footnoted, Gordon’s opus is likely to be the definitive treatment of
perhaps the genre’s definitive artist, a work of musical biography and history that should
have the same durability and relevance that Guralnick’s treatments of Elvis Presley
(Last Train to Memphis and Careless
Love) have had.
Can’t Be Satisfied (featuring a foreword by Keith Richards) follows Waters
(born McKinley Morganfield) from his pre-Depression days as a sharecropper on the
Mississippi Delta’s Stovall Plantation through his WWII-era “discovery” by
folklorists Alan Lomax and John Work III, his subsequent migration to Chicago, his
mid-century emergence as the country’s greatest blues star, and later status as
rock-and-roll godfather and blues-revival icon.
It’s a work that reveals the big-picture impact of Waters’ unique rise as impressively
as it accumulates biographical detail. “After spending so much time on him, I tried
to figure out a way to explain what it was [Waters] had done,” Gordon explained during
a recent interview at the Midtown guest house/office
where he wrote the book, “and in a way what the blues had
done. What I came up with was Muddy Waters as the
triumph of the dirt farmer. He turned white culture’s
head around, from disrespecting black culture to
embracing it. And I think that the power of that turnaround
is the great democratic movement of the 20th
century, sort of [the American equivalent] of when the
Berlin Wall went down. Muddy began that process and took
a lot of people on that road.”
Gordon’s own relationship with Muddy Waters
began in 1977, when, as a teenager, he discovered
Waters through the aging icon’s then-new comeback
album Hard Again, considered by some the greatest blues
studio album ever. Between that discovery and
Waters’ death in 1983, Gordon estimates that he saw
Waters play about a dozen times both in Memphis and
Philadelphia, where Gordon attended college.
Despite this familiarity, Gordon still found that
he knew a lot more about Memphis blues than the
Chicago scene which made up the bulk of Waters’ vast career.
But Gordon insists he wasn’t intimidated by the project.
“This, to me, was really of the same scope as
It Came From Memphis,” he said. “The difference was that this story
begins so much earlier in history in an oral culture of which
very few records were kept. I realized quickly that I was
battling time and that, if I wanted to get anything on
[Waters’] earlier years, I would have to go and find those people, that there weren’t going
to be many written records. So I started looking for people old people. I had a couple
of great days down [in Mississippi] where I just rode around asking people if they
knew where any old people lived.”
Waters’ early years in Chicago presented a similar problem. Gordon found that
there were only a few people who really knew the whole story of those years, and they were
all dead, except for Waters’ notoriously reticent guitarist Jimmy Rogers. Gordon was
able to get one interview with Rogers three months before he died.
There are other interview subjects whom Gordon cited as favorites, particularly
Waters’ granddaughter, Amelia Cooper, to whom Gordon in part dedicates the book.
“She really brought me inside his home,” Gordon said of Cooper. “She was 3 years old
when she moved in with Muddy and his wife in 1959, and she was raised by him as a dad
and was inside the home for everything. She was very frank and was a very inspiring
person. Her ability to speak without couching the things she saw, even when they hurt her,
was very inspiring to me. She was great.”
Gordon also said that he owes a great debt to harmonica player Paul Oscher, the
New York City native who was the highly unlikely first white member of Waters’ band
when he joined in 1968 as a teenager. “When I left [Oscher’s] Brooklyn basement
apartment [after an interview],” Gordon remembered, “I said, ‘Good, now I’ve got a book.'”
And the book Gordon ended up with is a hard, warm look at an illiterate genius
whose musical greatness was mitigated by his culturally bred tendency to acquiesce to
authority figures and whose immense personal charm was as great as his immense personal foibles.
(“I knew Muddy’s general story, and I had a feeling that he catted around a lot,” Gordon
said. “So his sexual affairs were not a shock. But when I realized how many women he had
going at the same time, it was really incredible.”)
Emblematic of Waters’ too-often ignored
musical instincts, Gordon cited one particular passage in
which Waters convinces his skeptical boss, label-owner
Leonard Chess, to record a new artist named Chuck
Berry. “That moment typifies the difference between
Leonard and Muddy,” Gordon said. “I think, left to his
own devices, Muddy would have kept on making good records, but, because of his ingrained
sharecropping mentality, he demurred to Leonard all the time,
even though Leonard often didn’t really know what he
was doing. And that’s why we have all of these
horrible records from the middle years, because Leonard
was trying to manufacture the sound.”
Gordon himself demurred when prodded to declare his subject the blues’ most important artist,
though he did acknowledge that Waters embodies the scope
of the music more fully than anyone else.
“He’s sort of like a blues Zelig,” Gordon said,
in reference to the Woody Allen film in which the title
character pops up in key moments throughout history.
“He was in the Delta and he was in Chicago. He started
on acoustic and then had basically the first electric
blues hits. He was a folkie in the early ’60s and psychedelic
in the late ’60s. He was everywhere. And so by writing
about him, I got to write about the whole history of
modern blues. Muddy set the template.”
Robert Gordon has several local events scheduled this week to celebrate the release
of Can’t Be Satisfied, among them:
Wednesday, May 22nd: Gordon will hold a book
signing from 5 to 7 p.m. at Burke’s Book Store.
Friday, May 24th: Gordon will be on the panel
for “Blues From the Delta To the World,” part of the
Blues Foundation’s Handy weekend Blues Symposium. At
3 p.m. at the new Central Library, Gordon will be
joined by Bob Santelli, CEO of the Experience Music
Project and author of The Big Book of Blues, Art Tipaldi,
senior writer for Blues Revue, and Edwina
Handy Decosta, great-granddaughter of W.C. Handy.
The panel will be followed by a performance from former
Waters sideman Bob Margolin.
Later that night, Gordon and Margolin will team up at
the New Daisy Theatre for a tribute concert to Waters and a
premiere screening of Gordon’s companion documentary,
Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied. Gordon’s hour-long
documentary condenses the narrative of the book and spikes it with
photos, performance footage, and interview segments with artists
such as B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt. The documentary will air
as part of the PBS American Masters series next February and
will be screened at 9 p.m. at the New Daisy. The
screening will be followed at 10:30 by a tribute concert
featuring the Bob Margolin Band, Calvin “Fuzz” Jones and
Hubert Sumlin (both also one-time Waters sidemen,
though Sumlin is best known for his work with Waters
rival Howlin’ Wolf), former New York Dolls frontman
David Johansen, and other unannounced guests. The
concert will be filmed, along with other events over the
weekend, for the Memphis episode of The
Blues, a seven-part documentary series executive-produced by Martin
Scorsese that will air on PBS sometime next year. Gordon is the
writer and associate producer of the Memphis episode.
Saturday, May 25th: Gordon will hold a book
signing at 5 p.m. at Tower Records in Peabody
Place.
LOCAL BEAT
As the bulk of the blues world descends upon Memphis for this
year’s Handy Awards, there are far too many related events to discuss here, but we do have space
to highlight a few, starting, of course, with the awards
themselves. The sponsoring Blues Foundation is boasting that this
year’s ceremony could be the most entertaining yet, and judging
from the announced lineup, it’s hard to disagree. The highlight of
the show which takes place at The Orpheum theater at 7:30
p.m. on Thursday, May 23rd promises to be a Sun Records
reunion/tribute. Sun’s rockabilly side got an understandably
huge amount of attention during the past year’s 50th anniversary
celebration, but the label’s blues legacy seems to have been
unjustly ignored in all the brouhaha. The Handys aim to set that
straight by putting Sun-connected blues icons B.B.
King, Ike Turner, Little Milton, and
Roscoe Gordon onstage together. The ceremony will also air a video tribute to Sun founder
Sam Phillips.
Other notable performers scheduled to appear this year
include Charlie Musselwhite, Marcia
Ball, Otis Taylor, Maria Muldaur, and
Shemekia Copeland. On the awards side, Ball and comeback kid Turner headline a stellar group, with
multiple nominations. Both are up for Entertainer of the Year.
The weekend slate of events kicks off Friday afternoon
with the Memphis-based Blues Music Association’s annual
town-hall meeting, an open-to-the-public opportunity for blues
professionals to hash out the state of the genre. The meeting will be held from
4 to 6 p.m. at Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club downtown.
Friday night, the Handy Festival will feature some of
the world’s biggest blues stars performing throughout clubs on and
off Beale Street. B.B. King at his namesake club is the undeniable
highlight, but other pairings include Deborah
Coleman at the Lounge, Ann Rabson at Rum Boogie Café,
Paul Reddick & The Sidemen at Silky O’Sullivan’s, and
Otis Taylor at Blues City Café.
On Saturday night, The Music Maker Revival
Show will be held at the New Daisy Theatre. The show is a benefit for the
Music Maker Relief Foundation, a North Carolina-based nonprofit
organization that assists older Southern roots and blues performers
with food, shelter, medical care, and other needs. Performers will
include Cootie Stark, Beverly “Guitar”
Watkins, Jerry “Boogie”
McCain, and Cool John Ferguson, who have all recorded for the Music
Maker label, as well as former Handy nominee Willie
King and Memphis’ Robert Belfour. The cover price is $20, with all proceeds going
to the Music Maker Relief Foundation.
Finally, on Sunday from 3 to 9 p.m., the Beale Street
Blues Society will host its annual Beale Street Mess
Around at Blues City Café, with performances from local acts
Barbara Blue, Brad Webb & Mississippi
Morris, Mark Lemhouse & Scott Bomar,
and Eric Hughes, among many others. Cover is $5.