Clearing Muddy Waters
Featured Album
Technically, I suppose, you can divide Muddy Waters‘recording career neatly into three “phases”: the 1941-2, acoustic field recordings for Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress, his 1947-75 run with Chess Records and the Blue Sky albums produced by Johnny Winter beginning in 1977 and ending well before Muddy’s 1983 death. Of course, that still leaves holes in his discography – such as the four 1946 tracks Muddy cut for Columbia before signing with Chess, and his Chess efforts more realistically fall into at least three sub-phases. Finally, there’s so much live Waters (most of it from the ’70s) out there on various labels that nobody seems to be quite sure where it all came from. So let’s try to sort this out.
The Library of Congress music (minus interviews available on the “official” version) appears on Muddy Waters 1941-1946, among them the transitional “Mean Red Spider” and the other three Columbia sides, as well as the exploratory, 1950 “Rollin’and Tumblin’.” There’s an eerie kind of serenity to most of these recordings, thanks to the organic balance between Muddy’s powerful voice and his slashing slide. Muddy plays with a firm hand – the sound of a man wishing he had an electric guitar, perhaps? – and sometimes, when he picks notes while sliding his bottleneck down the guitar neck, it sounds like two guitarists at work; the majority of the 1942 sides are recorded string-band-style with various combinations of the Son Simms Four. Several of these songs were re-recorded with a full electric band during his Chicago years; his “Country Blues,” which derives from Robert Johnson‘s “Walking Blues,” eventually morphed into the devastating “I Feel Like Going Home,” “I Be’s Troubled” into the menacing “I Can’t Be Satisfied.”
Because the label was eventually purchased by MCA, the bulk of Muddy’s Chess work isn’t yet available here. But some is, especially via import albums, and when you listen to it, you hear the sound of Delta-rooted, electric, Chicago combo blues being born. Chess originally recorded Waters accompanied by just a walking bass, and continued to do so for a while even after his mighty ’50s band, with Jimmy Rogers on second guitar and Little Walter blowing harp, was shaking Windy City clubs. Most of the albums of Chess material here are short, and tracks overlap considerably, with two or three favorites overwhelmed by twice as many lesser efforts. Many of the albums offering Chess tracks are extremely mixed bags, especially Blues Classics and Mississippi Rollin’Stone, which appear to be the exact same album but the song speeds are slightly different; the repertoire includes gems like the bristling “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” but also an “I Feel Like Going Home” with egregiously overdubbed horns and female backup voices.
Hard Again, the Winter/Blue Sky album that brought the then-62-year-old Muddy out of the wilderness recordingwise, is essential. Winter and Bob Margolin, not Muddy, played guitars here, while the blues patriarch sings with piss and vinegar that, judging from his whoops of delight, surprised even him. The album kicks off with a steamrolling new version of “Mannish Boy” that’s nothing less than an exorcism, wiping out the mostly-bad taste of the decade worth of Chess sets that preceded it. The rest of the album maintains those high standards, Winter providing cleansing National steel on “I Can’t Be Satsified,” and James Cotton introducing “The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll” with a fevered harmonica solo that indeed sounds like someone giving birth. I’m Ready, which reunited Muddy with Jimmy Rogers, is a worthy followup.
That leaves the live albums. Anyone with even a passing interest in blues simply must have Hoochie Coochie Man, recorded in 1964 in England, where Muddy’s electric sound had recently grown so popular that one band with an unknown singer named David Bowie called itself the Mannish Boys, and another was named the Rolling Stones. Muddy’s band features pianist Otis Spann, the most empathetic sideman he ever had, and these rowdy performances achieve the ultimate live effect of sounding simultaneously tight and loose, with Muddy providing otherworldly slide on a great batch of songs – the hair-raising “Hoochie Coochie Man” itself, a pinched, claustrophic “Long Distance Call” that’s equal parts anguish and anger, even the rarely-performed “Rosalie,” which went all the way back to Stovall’s Plantation. Of the various 70s live sets – usually including some combination of pianist Pinetop Perkins, guitarists Louis Meyers, Pee Wee Madison and Sammy Lawhorn, harpmen George “Harmonica” Smith and Mojo Buford, bassist Calvin Jones and drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, the relaxed The Lost Tapes is most satisfying.
That’s the best of Muddy Waters on eMusic – and Muddy’s best is as good as postwar blues gets.
