Spring 2005
New Series · Volume XXVII Number 2

Contents · Contributors · Selections · Editor's Notes & Cover Art

PETER RUTKOFF AND WILL SCOTT

PREACHING THE BLUES: THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA OF MUDDY WATERS

When Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield, traveled north to Chicago in 1943, he carried with him a whole generation of blues music. The Muddy Waters whom folklorist Alan Lomax recorded at Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale in 1941-42 played and sang the blues of rural Mississippi in the 1930s. Waters’ Delta blues reflected the stark beauty of the northern Mississippi landscape. Flat as far as the eye could see, farmed by black sharecroppers, the Mississippi Delta chained its African American labor to the land and produced the richest music in America. Like his musical mentors, Son House, Charlie Patton, and Robert Johnson, Waters belonged to a rich and expressive African American culture. Their music came from the plantation even as it provided a way out of the sharecroppers’ fields, a relief from the system of “furnish” and “settle”—food, fertilizer, clothes, and a mule in exchange for a share of the crop—that enforced white economic and political control. The power of the blues—its creative power—derived from the interconnected secular and religious cultural patterns of tens of thousands of African Americans living in the Delta. The blues belonged to a whole culture, one that sang spirituals and worksongs, that juked on “Sadys” and prayed on Sundays, that did the shout and the shimmy, that told tall tales and true stories, that conjured with black cat bones and mojo, too, that wore red flannel and bore children at home, that improvised the dozens and signified with marvelous verbal dexterity, and that survived poverty and oppressive racism, famine and flood. The Delta blues bore the fruit of its origins, simultaneously secular and sacred, American and West African.

“I Be’s Troubled”

Well [if] I feel tomorrow
Like I feel today,
[I’m] gonna pack my suitcase
And make my getaway
Lord, I’m troubled, I’m all worried in my mind
And I never been satisfied,
And I just can’t keep from cryin’.1

Muddy Waters played “I Be’s Troubled” on the steel-string slide guitar which he had tuned to an open G (the so-called Spanish tuning) combining the rhythmic and instrumental qualities of the Delta blues style with the lyric and sentiment of Baptist spirituals. “I Be’s Troubled” began as a blues, with Waters playing a sequence of sharply picked notes followed by rhythmic strums. He repeated the sequence three times, each time varying the accents, or the back-beat. In the opening phrase of the introduction, even before he allowed the guitar and slide to vocalize the melody, Muddy Waters established the improvisational and polyrhythmic basis of his blues. The apparent simplicity of the first bar of the song disclosed a startling intricacy of rhythmic and stylistic expression. Muddy maintained that intricacy through the introduction, using the slide to swoop up and down the neck, “worrying” the notes, intensifying the rhythm, and playing the melody first in the bass and then the treble registers in anticipation of the lryics. Muddy’s layering of the melodic, harmonic, and the rhythmic created a moving spiritual and emotional feeling.

The open-tuned slide guitar style that Muddy Water (he added the ‘s’ later) played allowed him to shape and search for notes and sounds evoked a rich and complex historical development. West African musical influences on the blues, especially from the Niger-Congo region, emphasized intensive polyphony, while others, from northern Nigeria, Mali, and Ghana derived from Islamic sources. Steel-string bottleneck playing incorporated the Muslim-influenced wavering, or melismatic effect, that combined with an open or drone string that gave some West African-derived music a single tonal center. This melismatic style also lent itself to call and response patterns that West Africans carried far into African American culture. West African musicians often played single-string bows, sometimes resonating against the body or into the earth to achieve the melismatic, droning effect that African American musicians incorporated into the one-stringed family of diddly-bows or the multiple-stringed banjos in the nineteenth century.2 “I Be’s Satisfied” bore the stamp of this West African and African American heritage.

The lyric of the song also brought several other African American traditions together. “I Be’s Troubled” combined the obvious theme of loss and sorrow, in this case of a lost love, and evoked the familiar spiritual idea of troubles (“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had”) with that of movement (“Trabelin’ On”). Songs about spiritual and physical weariness, about being troubled and wanting to travel beyond the present, nurtured the blues. Even the syntax of the title, “I Be’s Troubled,” revealed the song’s cultural heritage. Many West African languages and the African-American creolized Gullah have not distinguished between past and present in some verb usage. For example, “slaves indicated habitual actions, past or present, by using be plus the action verb, as . . . ‘you orter be carry money with you.’” In this way, “I Be’s Troubled” could also be understood as “I was troubled for some time,” rather than a simple grammatical mistaking of ‘be’ for ‘am.’3 “I Be’s Troubled” stretched out the action and emphasized the temporal, enduring quality of suffering. And, as Muddy Waters added, the only cure for suffering was leaving.

In the Delta, each settle, the moment when sharecroppers traded in the value of their crops against the debt of the owner’s furnish, carried with it the opportunity for cheating sharecroppers out of the fruits of their labor. Plantation owners and factors achieved this through complex manipulations of simple arithmetic figures or through the application of unscrupulously high interest rates on the furnish. The black responses, “skipping off” (leaving) or “getting over” (doing a less diligent job on someone else’s money) were ways to get even. “I Be’s Troubled” in Muddy Waters’ case was also “getting-over” over the troubles of heartache and of exploitation. In 1941 the song expressed the dream of leaving the Delta, not just for Muddy Waters but for the men and women who worked with him at Stovall, and a hundred other plantations, for those who dreamed of a better life.

The song’s refrain, “Yeah and I’m never bein’ satisfied,” and “I just can’t keep from cryin’,” repeated the be syntactical construction, and connected the tune to “SATISFYED” a popular ring game played by adolescent girls in Clarksdale. “SATISFYED,” a variation on a stealing partner game, placed its participants in a circle where they chanted and clapped in syncopation reminiscent of old-time spirituals that they called hallies (for hallelujah). As an improvised call and response shout, the refrain of “SATISFIED” moved back and forth between leader and congregation.

It takes a rockin’ chair to rock
                         SATISFIED!
It takes a soft ball to roll
                         SATISFIED!
It takes a song like this
                         SATISFIED!
To satisfy my soul.
                         SATISFIED!
              I ain’t never been
                         SATISFIED!
              I ain’t never been
                         SATISFIED!4

In 1948 Muddy Waters recorded “I Be’s Troubled” for Aristocrat Records in Chicago, under the title “I Can’t Be Satisfied.”5 An artifact of the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago, it reflected Waters’ altered perspective from the south to the north, of someone who had already “skipped off.”

Well, I’m goin’ away to leave
Won’t be back for more
Goin’ back down south, child
Don’t you want to go.
Woman I’m troubled, I be all worried in mind
Well baby I just can’t keep be satisfied
And I can’t keep from cryin’.

Muddy Water’s first version, “I Be’s Troubled,” had documented the world of plantation sharecropping from which the 28-year-old McKinley Morganfield had not yet been able to “pack my suitcase and make my getaway.”

Like ring-games, the “toasts” and verbal rhyme play of the Delta belonged to the Delta’s blues culture. Bawdy rhymes and stories, recited by males, part of the cultural ritual of “signifyin’” that reached back to West African trickster folktales that had survived in the new world and maintained themselves in the Delta.6 In a culture that prized verbal jousting and panache, the Titanic tale, an orally-transmitted toast, found a home in juke joints like Clarksdale’s Dipsy Doodle, a club on the Negro side of the railroad tracks. “The Sinking of the Titanic,” may have been composed by a blind Gospel songwriter Charles Haffer, a street evangelist, who recited his verse at a Baptist fair in Clarksdale:

Just then a millionaire girl walked from the bottom of the deck
She say “come back Po’Shine, and save po’ me.
I might turn your wife, it’s true.”
He looked back over his shoulders and said
“Honey, you’re purty-lookin jelly roll, it’s true.”
He said, “There are a thousand
In New York as good as you.”

When younger people took Haffer’s poem, intended as a broadside about the evil of money, the horror of hell, and the possibility of redemption, and walked it across the street to the Dipsy Doodle, it became “Shine and the Titanic.”

Just then a thousand white folks plopped up on the deck. And said, “Shine old boy, come save me. I’ll make you richer than a Shine can be.” Shine says, “There’s fish in the ocean, there’s whales in the sea: hop your white asses over board and swim like me.” The captain’s daughter . . . says “Shine old boy, come save po’ me. But Shine said, “Your petticoat look low and your words may be true, but there’s women on the shore got better booty than you.”7

In Clarksdale, blacks could be arrested for walking down the street that ran by the white-only swimming pool or for being out after midnight. The verbal agility and satire of this Baptist juke-joint toast expressed racial and social rebelliousness and resentment cloaked in rhetoric as ancient as West African culture itself. Forty years after the Lomax team “collected” the juke version of “Po’ Shine and the Titanic,” William Ferris, from the University of Mississippi, recorded its cousin in the Delta.

So Shine jumped overboard and it was a lady out there.
The lady said, “Shine, Shine save poor me.”
I’ll give you more pussy than your black eye can see.”
Shine say, “You got eight fingers, you got two thumbs.”
“Git your white ass out here and swim some.”8

The Dipsy Doodle in Clarksdale, or McKinley Morganfield’s juke out on Stovall Plantation about five miles north of town, provided locales for Delta blacks to come together and form a community. Saturday night at the juke, Sunday morning at church, equal parts in a culture that sustained a life where so many folks could say, “I Be’s Troubled.”

Rocking Daniel: The Plantation Church

“That’s a song I made up. . . . I was just walking the road and I heard a church song. . . .” Muddy Waters told Lomax and the team of Fisk University folklore “investigators” in August 1941.9 Working on the Coahoma County Project, the Fisk group found Muddy at Stovall Plantation where he had come at the age of three, in 1918, to live with his grandmother. A modest plantation—compared with some, like King and Anderson that owned 17,000 acres—Stovall farmed 3,500 acres of mostly cotton, supported about ninety sharecropping families who lived by the furnish, the settle, and the take up (borrowing to get through the month). McKinley Morganfield’s household farmed the land assigned to it, probably forty acres, and starting at the age of nine the young Muddy (that “little muddy baby,” a nickname bestowed by his grandmother) spent much of his time in the fields picking and chopping cotton. “I was a three-hundred-pound gal,” one woman remembered, “three hundred pound a day.”10 In the Delta, African Americans spent little time in schools—there were no high schools for blacks in the county until the 1950s. What little schooling they received was substandard (some schools were ordered not to teach the complexities of interest calculation for fear of “undermining” the settle) and most often provided by northern philanthropy. At Stovall children were educated either at home or in church.11

Like most Delta plantations Stovall was a self-contained world. Unpainted cabins, mostly shotgun, see-through wood structures, occasionally three-room affairs, lined up along the main dirt road of the plantation. Back doors opened right out into the fields. Many, lined with newspaper (some said to keep the devil distracted) and heated by wood-burning stoves had neither electricity nor plumbing. Sharecroppers dressed in the two sets of work clothes and shoes that the planters provided as part of the furnish. Whites believed that sharecroppers, like slaves, were no good with numbers, and they deemed the stock of the local store “two pair of pants and a gallon of molasses” more than adequate.12 Occasionally a plantation store might, after 1920, feature a single gas pump just in front of the porch benches and coke tubs.

The “New South Plantation” centered less on the old big house than on the long and imposing gin, the scene of the settle, and a nearby corrugated iron-roofed toolshed, a large wood structure where tenants came for tools and mules—only late in the 1930s for tractors.13 On Stovall, a small church, Oak Ridge Baptist, completed the plantation’s buildings. Oak Ridge Baptist, which McKinley’s uncle, Louis Matthews Morganfield attended, provided Stovall’s African Americans with a place to “jubilate.” At Oak Ridge Baptist they could shout during the hot and humid August revivals that coincided with lay-by time, the interval between chopping or weeding and the harvest, and sing spirituals, like “Get Right with You Jesus,” for their conversion at the Mourning Bench.14 The Oak Ridge congregation often came together to share the songs of the old-time religion—dancing without crossing their feet in what they called “Rocking Daniel.”15

Oak Ridge Baptist Church provided shelter for the few months a year that children received educational instruction. While Stovall plantation provided precious little in formal schooling, its owner, Howard Stovall, liked a good tune and often hired local musicians to play at family parties. Music seeped into the plantation from all directions—from the church, from the frolics on Saturday afternoons and the fish fries, and barbeques and picnics at ball games. As a young man McKinley Morganfield played and heard the music at Stovall on all these occasions. But, as he once said, in order to sing the blues you “had to go to church to get this particular thing in your soul.”16

McKinley’s uncle hoped that his own son, Willie, and his nephew McKinley, would follow in his pastoral footsteps. In a sense they did. Reverend Willie Morganfield became a Baptist preacher and famous gospel singer in Birmingham, Alabama, Cleveland, Ohio, and finally back in Clarksdale. His cousin, McKinley, never joined the church but as he acknowledged, his music never really left it. In 1936, however, Willie’s family left Stovall for Clarksdale where Reverend Louis Matthews Morganfield had been called to pastor.

The Seabird: Black Clarksdale

The Clarksdale of the 1920s and 1930s called itself the “golden buckle on the cotton belt,” and claimed more (white) millionaires per capita than any other town in America. The Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce in its brochure “Clarksdale—The Wonder City of the Delta,” boasted that the town “possesses 19 churches divided among the following denominations: Baptist, Methodists, 1st Presbyterian . . . and in addition there are ten negro churches.”17 Interestingly, the Fisk study group found eight Negro churches and over one hundred ministers in 1941.18 In 1940 Clarksdale’s population reached twelve thousand, its growth steady since its founding in 1869 when John Clark first settled in Coahoma (“Red Panther” in Choctaw) County. In 1903, the year he reportedly “discovered” the blues in Tutweiller, a small railroad town just outside of Parchman Farm, the notorious state prison, about sixty miles south of Clarksdale, W. C. Handy wrote of Clarksdale’s brothel, or New World, district. “Across the Y. & M. V. tracks . . . there was the local red light district. To the New World came lush octoroons and quadroons from Louisiana, soft cream-colored fancy gals from Mississippi towns.”19 In 1930 the city opened a Negro branch of the Carnegie Free Library downtown. While blacks remained disenfranchised in Clarksdale they comprised 72 percent of the population of the county, and over 80 percent of the city, just before the outbreak of World War II. The city’s finest hotel, the Alcazar, offered 125 rooms to any white visitor for between $1.50 and $3.50 a night.

Like every city in the Delta, race and class determined the social geography of Clarksdale. Poor and middle-class whites lived in close proximity to each other and to the Brickyard, a small Negro middle-class neighborhood. Upper-middle-class whites lived on the other side of town, across the Sunflower River, whose bridge provided a direct route to the downtown shopping area with its banks, post office, and library. Black working class and day laborers lived in the Roundyard, a neighborhood just off the Negro business district that centered on a small area separated from white downtown by the railroad tracks that ran through the center of Clarksdale. The middle class of the Brickyard did not normally approve of the Roundyard’s ways.

The town’s two thousand whites, as well as the ten thousand who lived scattered throughout the county could avail themselves of the city’s fifty-one food stores, twenty-two restaurants, eight furniture and appliance stores, five lumber yards, eleven automobile dealers, and nine drug stores. While these businesses did not bar their doors to blacks, they maintained separate “colored” entrances, often kept separate ledgers, identified “colored” patrons by the initials COL in the margins, and usually served black customers on Saturday afternoons and evenings, where by custom, whites chose to remain absent. Whites owned all the businesses in the white downtown and often sent trucks out to the plantations to bring patrons into town on Saturdays, especially during the harvest, and rarely during the winter.

The Negro business district, its “Beale” streets, a few square blocks centered on the corner of Fourth and Issaquena had all the black-owned businesses in Clarksdale, as well as those owned by a few Jewish, Italian, and Chinese families. Clarksdale’s small immigrant population “about twenty-five or thirty families of Jewish storekeepers . . . a few Greeks . . . a few Syrian families . . . and a few Chinamen engaged in laundries . . . and some dope on the side” lived in between, often unwelcome by both black and white.20 Fourth and Issaquena had Clarksdale’s only black hotel, the Savoy theater, a single furniture store, three gas stations, a host of jukes and cafés and beer parlors, barber shops, beauty parlors, groceries, and a funeral parlor. The two largest black churches stood directly across the street from the Dipsy Doodle, a favorite hangout for plantation blacks in the ’30s who came to town on Saturday nights to dance, eat tamales, drink beer, and listen to the blues on the juke’s Seabird, as they called the bright new Seeburg jukebox that sat in the middle of the floor.21

In the late 1930s many of the plantations near to Clarksdale—Stovall, Hopson, and King-Anderson—hired day laborers from among the men who lived in town. Early in the mornings, plantation trucks appeared at Fourth and Issaquena, where pickers congregated, to pick up laborers to work in the fields. When the need increased, plantations chartered Greyhound buses and by late summer 1941, labor agents appeared from Missouri and Arkansas. Even before Pearl Harbor, the international demand for cotton raised prices and wages in the Delta. In a single week in July 1941, both doubled. “Not since 1926 had the wages reached such a level. Everybody was in the fields. People who had been working for meager wages in the town quit their jobs.” Labor became so scarce in Clarksdale that summer that “white women were driving through the Negro residential district seeking someone who would work for them.”22

The labor shortage was one factor that led Delta plantation owners to shift from mules to tractors. In his late twenties, McKinley Morganfield became a tractor driver at Stovall and supplemented his income by operating a juke at his home, and played downtown in Clarksdale on a regular basis. Clarksdale’s jukes provided Waters a place to play and allowed him to learn from the host of itinerant blues musicians who performed in and around the town. “When I heard Son House I should have broke my bottleneck.”23 Waters might have easily said the same about Charlie Patton or Robert Johnson. By the time Lomax and his team finally recorded Waters in 1941, they found a mature Delta blues player who sounded for all the world as if he had been playing with these legends for all his life.

“Preaching the Blues”: The Legacy of Patton, House, and Johnson

In a sense Muddy Waters had. During the 1930s Delta blues men had been traveling, scuffling, and playing up and down the region for most of the decade. Making three bucks a night at a fish fry seemed a lot more attractive than picking and chopping cotton. They had chosen an itinerant life, a life of thumbing rides on the backs of pickup trucks and riding slow trains like the Pea Vine and the Yellow Dog. Like barnstorming ball players, the blues men of the Depression enjoyed the good life even when none existed, dressed to the nines when they could, and indifferent when they couldn’t. “Young, poor and mobile, they traveled from the countryside to the towns and cities and back again.”24

Little wonder that movement played such an important role in their music, from the ever present railroad,

How long, how long, babe
Has that evenin’ train been gone [“How Long, How Long Blues”]

to the surge of a powerful automobile,

I said flash your lights, mama
your horn won’t even blow [“Terraplane Blues”].

Each image had lent itself to the ecstatic wonder of sex,

Hitch up my pony saddl’ up my black mare
I’m gonna find a rider, oh baby in this world somewhere [“Pony Blues”].

And each related to the inner structure of blues music itself. “The devil was in the turn-around,” the blues musicians said. The turn-around, present in the blues between verse and chorus allowed musicians to lay their stamp on a song. A variation on a boogie-woogie lick, the turn-around brought a tune back to its beginning, completing the circle, making the blues into a ring.25 The turn-around, where the blues man could “signify” on the entire history of the song, since he had surely taken it in admiration from someone else, lay at both the beginning and the end. In railroad parlance the turn-around, the place where one turned the engine around, completed the metaphor.

The blues men, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charlie Patton, who schooled Muddy Waters, formed the circle of the Delta blues. They had been roaming around the Delta for a decade, in fast cars, on slow trains, preaching as they sang the blues.

Eddie James House, Jr., Son, came from Lyons, a small town near Clarksdale, worked and drifted throughout the south during the 1920s, and only began to play guitar late in that decade. When he took up the bottle-neck, perhaps in 1927, House thought that he had left his deeply religious upbringing behind him. But, like many Delta blues players, his music owed an enormous debt to the church and to spirituals. Following a two-year stint at Parchman Farm prison for killing another man (in self-defense, it was said), House often played in and around Lyons, an easy ride by mule or car for folks at Stovall to come hear him. His first recording session in 1930, for Paramount at a studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, included “Preachin’ the Blues” and “My Black Mama.” Robert Johnson would recast both six years later in “Walking Blues” and “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil).”

House’s songs drew their breath from religious feelings and imagery even as they seemed to criticize it. “Preachin’ the Blues” contained verses like:

Oh, I went in my room, bowed down to pray (x2)
Till the blues come along, and they blowed my spirit away.26

The song attested to House’s struggle with the church—I’m gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won’t have to work—even as he employed the African and African American tradition of derision, a form of social criticism directed less at the spirit than at the institution. But, as House explained later, “I’m preaching on this side and the blues is on that side. I says, well I’ll just put them together and name it ‘Preachin’ the Blues.’”27

In “John the Revelator,” which combined the cadence of a preacher with a biblical vision, House left no doubt about the spiritual sources of his music. Son House played with great tonal resonance in songs like “My Black Mama,” and “Preachin’ the Blues,” where his bottle-neck style laid a spare and sharp vibration, a West African inspired “whirring” that snaked in and around the deep power of his voice. But in “John the Revelator” House took a gospel song and sound, which he sang unaccompanied and slipped it into the protective cover of the twelve-bar AAB pattern of the blues.

Tell me who’s that writin’,
                           John the Revelator
Tell me who’s that writin’,
                           John the Revelator
Who’s that writin’,
                           John the Revelator,
wrote the book of the seven seals.

Robert Johnson took House’s “Preachin’ the Blues” and turned it inside out. House sang “Preachin’ the Blues” as an emotionally intense, highly pitched and strained spiritual with hints of work-song exhales. He accompanied the song with his trademark bottle-neck style and simple turn-around of two thumb-snapped notes followed by three upward picks. Johnson took the same tune with which he knew his audience was familiar and raised the stakes. His “Preachin’ the Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” recorded in 1936 after talent scout Howard Speir had “auditioned” and passed him along to the American Record Company, moved with the pulse of an express train. Johnson’s open-tuned bottle-neck guitar resembled House’s loose almost antique sound, but Johnson’s pace and technique left House’s older version in his tracks. Johnson’s turn-around, a set of call and response riffs picked on bass and treble strings as he simultaneously maintained the driving rhythm with his thumb, provided evidence of the West African trickster-derived “devil at the crossroad” explanation of his new-found musical prowess.

The blu-u-ses
           Is a low-down shakin’ chil
           (spoken, “Yes, preach’ em now”)
Mmmmmm mmmmmm
           Is a low-down shakin’ chil
You ain’t never had ’em, I
           hope you never will.28

Johnson’s blues, his “preach ’em now,” not only glossed Son House’s “Preachin’ the Blues,” but connected him to a tradition that reached back to Bessie Smith’s “Preach Them Blues,” (Preach them blues / sing them blues / they certainly sound good to me) and extended forward to B. B. King’s exclamation about the blues, “I feel like I’m in church and even want to shout.”29

Yet, Johnson’s genius, rather than his “devil’s” persona, derived from his originality. Staying entirely within the Mississippi blues tradition, Johnson nonetheless emerged as its great innovator. Sometime in 1933, coincident with his crossroads/trickster conversion Johnson may have adapted the boogie-woogie blues piano style into a new open-tuning guitar style. Derived from the influences of Roosevelt Sykes and Leroy Carr, contemporaries Johnson met and played with in Helena, Arkansas, and St. Louis, the new tuning allowed him to play piano-based accompaniments, the picked embellishments that made his playing so complexly intricate, layered, and rhythmic on the blues guitar. By the time of his legendary 1936 recording sessions, Johnson had mastered the tuning and technique that allowed him to participate in the blues tradition that he was in the process of transcending. A song like “Sweet Home Chicago” had as many as twenty-three earlier melodic versions including Sykes’ “The Honey Dripper,” and Kokomo Arnold’s “Original Old Kokomo Blues.”30 But in Johnson’s hands it rode straight and hard toward its destination, turned around in an elegant and fast bass-riff, and went its way again, fast as lightning.

Oh, baby, don’t you want to go, oh
Baby don’t you want to go,
Back to the land of California
           To my sweet home Chicago.

Robert Johnson’s “additive” approach to the blues, his process of borrowing and then adapting, revealed itself clearly in “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” which he crafted after Charlie Patton’s “You Gonna Need Someone When You Die.” As in the case of Johnson’s amendment to Son House, his version retained Patton’s hymn-based spiritual origins.

Charlie Patton, too, owed his life, at least his culture, to the cotton plantations of the Delta, specifically to the Dockery Plantation in the central Delta. As the son of a sanctified minister, Patton spent his early years at Dockery, a plantation of more than eighteen thousand acres, among the four hundred families that sharecropped for owner Will Dockery. He and Son House crossed paths at Dockery and again in the late 1920s in Clarksdale. Patton also spent a good deal of time in Marigold, a small town just two miles south of Mound Bayou. For all the rough edge in his voice Patton never parted ways with his religious upbringing, instead, like House, finding ways to insinuate that musical influence into the blues.31 Patton recast a traditional spiritual into “You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die,” which he recorded in 1929. He retained the spiritual’s AA-Refrain pattern and added a short sermon in the middle of the song. Patton’s rhymed couplets, right from the pulpit, his repetitions of “an . . . an . . . an . . . an . . .” distinguished the religious foundations of the song. Later, Robert Johnson turned Patton’s tune into a railroad song and retitled it “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” preserving the religious melody and structure but restating the subject in very worldly terms.

It’s the last fair deal goin’ down
It’s the last fair deal goin’ down
It’s the last fair deal goin’ down, Good Lord.
             On that Gulfport Island Road.32

Patton, House, and Johnson, the three great innovators of the Delta blues each embraced their music’s religious and spiritual roots. Patton and House spent parts of their lives as preachers and they shared a rough-edged vocal style that moaned from the depths of their spirits. Johnson’s evocation of Devils and Hell Hounds and Bad Men represented the flip side of the blues theology, a meditation on evil that Johnson encouraged by dressing the West African trickster up as Satan. Johnson’s driving rhythms, a feature he shared with House, the bursts of percussive phrases, repeated the beat of West African drum music, transferred to the guitar.33 The country blues of the Mississippi Delta that matured in the 1930s combined the percussive pulse of the guitar with rough and unpolished vocal styles, blending sacred and secular, West African and African American.

When the Coahoma County Study Project arrived in Clarksdale in the summer of 1941 they found in Muddy Waters a repository of the Delta’s rich and complex musical culture. The Fisk-Lomax group learned that Clarksdale had been home not just to Waters, but to Patton in 1929-30, Son House, who had preached at Lyons, and Robert Johnson, who played at nearby Friar’s Point. A young John Hooker also lived in Clarksdale, as did Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf), Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Elmore James, and Ike Turner. In Clarksdale Muddy Waters had learned well the lessons of House, Patton, and Johnson. He steeped himself in the blues culture of the region, and was ready. In 1942, Lomax recorded Muddy Waters again. Of the five songs he played, two, “You Got to Take Sick and Die One of These Days,” and “Why Don’t You Live So God Can Use You,” came from church hymns. “You Got to Take Sick and Die One of These Days” was based on two sung-sermons recorded in Chicago in 1929 and 1934, and Muddy used them melodically and thematically for his version.34 More Son House and Charlie Patton than Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters’ “You Got to Take Sick and Die One of These Days” combined his slide guitar whine with a chuch-a-chuch rhythm of the train. Muddy explained, like a preacher, both knowing and sad, that change, even death, was inevitable.

You got to take sick and die one of these days,
You got to take sick and die one of these days,
All the medicine you can buy and all the doctors you can hire,
You got to take sick and die one of these days.

By July 1942, America had already entered the Second World War and the forces that made a Second Great Migration into a movement of staggering proportions had already begun to change the Delta. Mechanization of cotton farming would, by 1945, make sharecropping an anachronism as the increased demand for industrial jobs in the north became irresistible. Once again black Mississippians, now mostly from the Delta, made their way to the cities of the north—to Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and especially to Chicago. The second wave of African American migrants were poorer and less educated than the first wave, but they carried with them their rich musical and religious culture.

From Clarksdale and Greenville and Greenwood and Indianola and Batesville and Vicksburg, more than one hundred thousand African Americans from the Mississippi Delta who had lived and worked on cotton plantations but juked and shopped on a dozen black business district streets took their experiences with them. In Chicago they would make South Forty-seventh Street in the very heart of the black South Side, no less familiar to them than Fourth Street in Clarksdale. And Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks would people her imagined “Street in Bronzeville” with characters familiar to the new migrants from the Delta: the Delta of the blues man, Stagolee, John Henry, and John the Revelator. Former sharecroppers and tractor drivers, in the migration to Chicago the African Americans of the Delta had decided to “Fly Away.” In leaving the South they chose freedom over oppression. In the words of their ancestors they were “Walkin’ Egypt” and “Rocking Daniel.”

Notes

      1The Complete Plantation Recordings: Muddy Waters. Library of Congress Field Recordings, 1941-42. Stovall, MS, Aug. 1941, July 1942 and Clarksdale, MS, 1942. Chess/MCA CHD-9344.
      2Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1999) 9-16; 59-92.
      3Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1985) 200-01. See also, J. L. Dillard, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Random House, 1972).
      4Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993) 89. These words appear, to be sure, in more than one blues as well.
      5Chess Blues Classics, 1947-1956. Chess/MCA, CHD-9369.
      6Henry Lewis Gates, The Signifyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988).
      7Samuel G. Adams, Jr., Changing Negro Life in the Delta, M.A. thesis, Fisk University, 1947. Adams, a member of the Fisk team in the Delta, collected much of the folklore used by Lomax in his book published almost fifty years later.
      8William Ferris, Black Folklore of the Mississippi Delta, Ph.D dissertation, U of Pennsylvania, 1968, 167. See also Kyle Vernon Bennett, Junior Kimbrough’s Juke Joint: A Story to Be Told, M.A. thesis, U of Mississippi, 1996. Bennett continued to find “toasts” such as the “Monkey and the Lion” that continued the “Signifyin’ Monkey” genre.
      9The Complete Plantation Recordings, Interview 2.
      10Norva Lee Harris, interview, Mound Bayou, MS, Oct. 2000.
      11Sandra B. Tooze, Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man (Chicago: ECU Press, 1997) 20-24. The details of his early life. Statistics on the Rosenwald Schools may be found in Lewis Jones, Statistical Atlas of the Southern States, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1941).
      12Ted Owenby, American Dreams in Mississippi (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999) 64-72.
      13Charles Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999) 111.
      14Rev. Willie Morganfield, interview, Clarksdale, MS, Feb. 2001.
      15Lomax, 72.
      16Tooze, 26-33.
      17Madge Baucom, Clarksdale—The Wonder City of the Delta, Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce (Clarksdale, MS: Carnegie Free Library, n.d).
       18Adams, 10.
      19Neil McMillan, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, (Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1989) 16.
       20Abe Isaacson, who moved to Clarksdale in 1914, quoted in History of Clarksdale and Coahoma County, (n.d.) 109.
      21Adams, 11. Lomax, 37. Lomax didn’t quite get the quote right. It may be found in History of Clarksdale and Coahoma County (Clarksdale Public Library, n.d.).
      22Lewis Jones, Memorandum to Alan Lomax and Charles S. Johnson, “Field Trip to Coahoma County,” Library of Congress, Division of Folklife, n.d.
      23Tooze, 37.
      24Owenby, 115-18.
      25Paul Oscher, interview, Los Angeles, CA., Jan. 2001.
      26Son House, The Original Delta Blues, Columbia Records, 65515.
      27Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993) 11.
      28Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings, Columbia, (1990) C2K 64916. Contains all of Johnson’s recordings.
      29Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 237.
      30The discussion of Robert Johnson’s “new” technique owes itself to the learned study by Edward Komara, The Road to Robert Johnson, which Mr. Komara provided in proof form to the authors.
      31Spencer, 64.
      32Charlie Patton, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order (Document Records, 2 vols. DOCD-5009-10).
      33Robert Springer, Authentic Blues (New York: Edwin Meller Press, 1999). See also David Evans, Big Road Blues (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) and Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning (New York: Cambridge UP, 1960).
      34Roxy David LePue, Muddy Waters Library of Congress Field Recordings: An Analysis of His Early Repertoire, M.A. thesis, U of Memphis, 1998.

PETER RUTKOFF and WILL SCOTT have worked together for twenty-five years. At Kenyon College they teach American Studies and history, respectively, and are the authors of New School: A History of the New School for Social Research and New York Modern: The Arts and the City. Between 1997 and 2000 they jointly held the NEH Chair in Distinguished Teaching at Kenyon where they developed the award-winning course “North by South.” They are currently completing their new book, Fly Away: The Great African American Migration, from which their Kenyon Review essay is taken.

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