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Title: Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters by Robert Gordon ISBN: 0316328499 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62
Rating: 5
Summary: Wasn't that a man
Comment: ...
Such was the power of Muddy Waters, the rollin' stone from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, whose stark, raw songs transformed popular culture. Robert Gordon, who comes from Memphis, an hour or two north of where Waters grew up, has written the first extended biography that captures the elusive character of this hugely influential man. Waters' life was changed when self-aggrandising musicologist Alan Lomax drove up the dirt road, parked outside the shack in the middle of cotton fields, and asked for a guitar player he'd heard about. (Lomax leaves his black assistant out of his biography; Gordon restores his place in history.) Waters - already nearly 30, but still ploughing fields - sang some tunes for Lomax, and hearing his voice on an acetate showed him the possibilities that lay beyond the wide, wide horizon of the Delta.
Muddy Waters was illiterate, so Gordon - author of It Came From Memphis, a splendid social and musical history which manages to leave out Elvis - had to reconstruct his life story from interviews with his band members (many just before they died), the Chess family, and his children, legitimate and illegitimate. There are many of the latter; Muddy didn't go far without a "road wife": "[he] went through several wives, and always had women on the side, and women on the other side too." Gordon doesn't shy from the irresponsible, self-absorbed side of Muddy, a man who'd cheat on his wife without conscience, but support a musician in trouble just as casually. This is often a dark story, full of guns, violence, hard liquor and loose living. Success brought fame but not wealth to Muddy, thanks to his umbilical, exploitative relationship with Chess Records, a continuation of the "furnish" support he got from his cotton farmer back in the Delta.
This is the work of a Southern storyteller, it's like sitting back on the porch listening to tales tall and true. Gordon evocatively describes the various scenes of Muddy's life: the cotton economy, the early electric blues of Chicago, the endless road trips, the magic of the Chess studios, and the highs and lows of a career that generated more respect than cash. In Chicago, Muddy's "South Side house stayed rocking. Phones ringing, meats frying, and greens boiling, the TV broadcasting a baseball game, a shoot-'em-up. Muddy, in black T-shirt and black boxers. And always there was music." In the basement, his ever-changing band practiced chords that never changed, but changed the world. Wasn't that a man. A full-grown man.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Book about a Great Blues Man.
Comment: "Can't Be Satisfied" is a great book about one of the greatest blues men who ever lived. Author Robert Gordon lays out in brilliant and well-researched detail the life and times of Muddy Waters, from his early days on the Stovall, MS plantation and his first "recording session" for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress, to his rise as the progenator of Chicago blues, to his final days and passing in 1983 and how his life shaped those of virtually everyone close to him. Gordon, in rare interviews with Waters' family members, friends and close associates, also lets the reader into the life of a blues man of Waters' stature at that time: constant touring, heavy drinking and smoking, womanizing, the out-of-wedlock children that he fathered, and how it all affected him personally, professionally and financially. In short, this book honestly tells the story of Muddy Waters the Chicago Blues icon, the player, the man, the human being.
This is a must-read for any blues fan.
Rating: 4
Summary: Notes Section is a Nice Touch
Comment: Robert Gordon has the subject of a lifetime in telling the tale of an illiterate sharecropper born McKinley Morganfield. Morganfield's story starts with him working sun to sun in the Mississippi cotton fields and playing fish fries with an acoustic box. It eventually ends with Muddy Waters fully electrified on international stages and at the White House (where, according to Calvin Jones, they didn't get paid a dime and were feted with hot dogs). In between are tales of car wrecks, knife fights, dumbheaded attempts at "updating" his rural sound, royalty ripoffs, hired musicians, fired musicians, and rehired musicians.
Waters is definitely a problematic individual - fiercely protective of those who cut the trail in front of him (ie Son House), loyal to the paternalistic systems of Stovall and Chess, yet also rampantly adulterous and unable to protect some of his children from the ravages of heroin and street life.
In the best of the oral blues tradition, Gordon has used the words of those who lived and played with Waters, including Marshall Chess, James Cotton, Willie Smith, and Jimmy Rogers, to flesh out the portrait. Their stories are the best part of the book. Everyone in the band drank heavily, everyone carried knives and guns, everybody had a pretty girl waiting on them in the next town. The reminiscences of harpist Paul Oscher are particularly amusing, while the perspective of Muddy's granddaughter Cookie reveals there were definitely two men wearing the same shoes - the decent provider and family man Morganfield and the stage persona and adulterer Muddy Waters.
In the end, Gordon succeeds, although the topic is so rich it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel..., "Can't be Satisfied" does a fine job of recreating the life and times of Muddy Waters.
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Title: Blues With a Feeling: The Little Walter Story by Tony Glover, Scott Dirks, Ward Gaines ISBN: 0415937116 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Voice of the Blues : Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine by Jim O'Neal, Amy Van Singel, James O'Neal, Peter Guralnick ISBN: 0415936543 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title:His Best: 1947 to 1955 ASIN: B000005KQH Publisher: Mca Pub. Date: 25 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $13.99 |
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Title: Deep Blues by Robert Palmer ISBN: 0140062238 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax ISBN: 1565847393 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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