Muddy Waters
The newly released film Cadillac Records documents Chicago’s Chess Records from the 1940s to the 1960s, when hugely influential artists like Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Willie Dixon wrote and recorded many of the groundbreaking songs that would first bring African American music to a national audience.
Perhaps the most important of all Chess’s artists was blues legend Muddy Waters, played in the film by the excellent Jeffrey Wright. Robert Gordon’s 2002 biography of Waters, Can’t Be Satisfied, is now out in paperback, and it is a brilliant study of the man and his incalculable influence on 20th century culture.
Gordon’s story is centered around the events of August 31, 1941, when Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax successfully tracked down the 28-year-old Mississippi Delta sharecropper McKinley Morganfield, already legendary in the music-rich region as “Muddy Waters.” Up to this point Waters’ considerable artistic ambitions left him deeply unsettled amid the crushing drudgery of the Delta cotton fields, and Gordon tells the fascinating tale of how the folklorist first recorded Waters’ powerful voice and guitar.
Gordon’s extensive interviews with Waters’ friends and family reveal a troubled, searching soul whose demons were translated into incandescent songs of hurt and longing. The author interestingly contrasts the communal spirit of gospel music and its focus on the afterlife with the immediate, individual release offered by the blues. Little more than two decades after Waters’ first recordings, his music would be a seminal influence on rock musicians like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones and would vault Waters into the pantheon of legendary 20th century artists.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards provides an entertaining foreword to Can’t Be Satisfied, describing the unmistakeable influence on the band named after one of Waters’s own best-known songs. “There’s a demon in me,” Richards writes, “I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff. When you listen to Muddy Waters, you can hear all of the angst and all of the power and all of the hardship that made that man.”
Can’t Be Satisfied is a brilliantly researched, lovingly written testament to Muddy Waters and his continuing influence on popular culture. In this terrific interview with NPR’s Terri Gross, Gordon talks about his work and also plays some of Waters’ earth-shaking, soul-moving music.
