( 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 28th 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.
