Listening Comprehension Test for 11th Form Students

                                       ( from “Muddy Waters” by Tim Cahill)

Sharecropper – спільник, пайовик

            It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That is pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well. I remember hearing Muddy Waters play, but in the mid –‘60s,  during a blues revival. I was a college student and unaware of the fact that the blues were being revived or that they needed to be. The music and the lyrics moved me. They still do.

            Muddy Waters grew up on the Stovall Plantation, not far from Clarksdale, Mississippi. The house where he lived is gone now, rebuilt in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. The idea was to preserve the structure, a humble rough-cut cedar building of the type that housed sharecroppers. There was only a depression in the grass where Muddy’s childhood home had been. A plaque nearby identified the site and included a quote from Eric Clapton : “Muddy Waters’ music changed my life, and whether you know it or not, and like it or not, it probably changed yours too”.

            These words ring true. I could see it all over the Mississippi Delta region, where the music we call the blues was born. The blues wandered off down south, where it influenced the sound of the jazz that was springing up in different forms in New Orleans. But most of the blues travelled with itinerant blues men, and it moved north. Memphis, the capital of the mid-South, only a few hundred miles north of the Delta, was a natural destination for a musically talented and ambitious man.

            But the blues weren’t done travelling. Chicago was a destination for Delta blacks, many of whom were out at work due to new mechanized cotton sowing and picking machines. Chicago was seen as a sort of Utopia. There were jobs for the taking, and there was no lingering heritage of slavery.

            Afro-Americans in the Delta had seen Chicago through rose-colored glasses for many decades. In the mid-1930s, “Sweet Home Chicago” was a famous song. Chicago hired men to work in steel mills and foundries and in the stockyards and meat-packing houses. The black-owned and operated newspaper The Chicago Defender encouraged migration to Chicago. It told people that there were more jobs than men in the big city up north. It was true. There is a statue of a weary black traveler with a broken suitcase near the old station, at Martin Luther King and 28^th Street, on the South Side of Chicago. There is no plaque, and I assume the monument is meant to immortalize the “Great Migration North”.

            When Muddy Waters took the Illinois Central to Chicago in 1943, he asked a few questions at Union Station, found a relative’s apartment without any trouble, and got a job at a container factory that day, a Saturday. Muddy, who’d quit a 22.5-cent-per-hour job driving a tractor at the Stovall Plantation in the Delta, had been told by Chicago friends that he’d never make it with his guitar in the big city. Muddy was told, “They don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doing now, nobody listens to that, not in Chicago”.

            But Muddy pressed on, playing in little clubs for $5 a night. By the next year, 1944, he had enough money to buy his first electric guitar. The idea was to cut through the sound of the noisy South Side clubs, where most blacks had settled. But the amplification of the slide guitar Muddy played, of the harmonica played by his longtime collaborator, they sounded like voices. And the voices rocked. Did half the rock artists to follow take ideas from Muddy Waters and his band? They surely did. Muddy himself said, “the blues had a baby, and they called it rock ’n’ roll”.   

In 1952 Muddy wrote the song “Rollin’ Stone”. It was a nation-wide success, and the song echoes down through rock ‘n’ roll history. Bob Dylan wrote a tribute song by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called Rolling Stone.

            And this is where I came in, a white college student driving down from the University of Wisconsin to hear Muddy Waters and the great musicians of that time. And they changed my life.

 The blues wrapped me in an aural web, and I was never the same. Indeed, I ended up working for that music magazine, Rolling Stone, which was named after a Muddy Waters song. In fact, I still work there and have, on and off, for over 30 years. Whether he knew it or not – and he surely did not – Muddy Waters started changing my life in 1963, and I have a feeling he still isn’t done with me.

Listening Comprehension Test for 11^th Form Students    Assignments    

Task 1. Put  (+) if the statement is true, and (-) if the statement is false.

1. The author believes Muddy Waters was an important person in the migration of the blues.
2. The author was influential in the migration of the blues.
3. The blues were born in the Mississippi River Delta.
4. The song “Sweet Home Chicago” was written in the 1930s in the style of rock’n’roll.
5. Muddy Waters had trouble finding a job in Chicago.
6. Muddy Waters brought an electric sound to blues music.
7. Rock’n’roll came after the blues.
8. The name “Rolling Stone” originally came from a music magazine.
9. The author works for Rolling Stone magazine.
10. Muddy Waters’ music changed the author’s life

Task 2. Circle the right answer A, B, C, or D

11.  Muddy  Waters is ...

A. a type of blues music. B. a town in Mississippi.  C a blues musician. D a place in the Delta region

12. Muddy Waters’ childhood home on the Stovall Plantation...

            A.  is in its original location.

            B.  has a plaque near where it used to be located.

            C.  is in Chicago

            D.  was dedicated to the plantation owners.

13. Over time, the blues music moved...

            A.  south to Mississippi.

            B.  east to New Orleans

            C.  west to Mississippi.

            D.  north to Chicago.

14. People saw Chicago through “rose-colored glasses’. This means they saw...

            A.  Chicago in a positive way.

            B.  Chicago in a negative way.

            C.  Chicago while wearing sunglasses.

            D. Chicago’s stockyards and steel mils.

15. The monument of a traveler with a broken suitcase near the station in Chicago is meant to ...

            A. be a tribute to Muddy Waters

            B. immortalize the migration of job-seeking blacks, and  so the music they played..

C.     identify the site of the house where Muddy Waters was born.

D.     tell travelers there was no lingering heritage of slavery.

16.  Why was Muddy Waters told “They don’t listen to that kind of old blues you are doing now?”

            A. Muddy Waters played the electric guitar.

            B. People didn’t like his song “Rollin’ Stone”.

            C. People in Chicago would think Muddy Waters’ music was out of date.

            D. Muddy Waters worked at a container factory.

17. In Chicago, Muddy Waters bought...

            A. blues music    B. an electric guitar    C. rock’n’roll music   D. a harmonica

18. What was NOT a factor in the movement of blues music?

            A. A black-owned newspaper

            B. Higher paying jobs in Chicago.

            C. once during a blues revival, and did not like his music

            D. Higher paying jobs in Mississippi.

19. The author listened to Muddy Waters ...

            A. at university and still does

            B. Travelling blues musicians.

            C. at university while studying for an exam.

            D. only in Chicago

20. The author likes Muddy Waters because...

            A. they knew each other growing up on Stovall Plantation

            B. his music has greatly influenced his life

            C. he wrote about Muddy Waters for Rolling Stone magazine.

            D. he knew Muddy Waters in Chicago.