Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Read online

  The key verse of “Mannish Boy,” for me, comes when Muddy paints a succinct little scene showing us exactly how powerful the Hoochie Coochie Man has become:

  Sittin’ on the outside

  Just me and my mate

  I made the moon

  Come up two hours late

  Well, isn’t that a man?

  He’s so sexually powerful and theatrical and astounding that if he’s outdoors with his woman, this will have an effect on everyone and everything, including the moon. Was the moon late because it was too bashful to watch his masculine prowess, or because it was so enthralled in watching him it forgot to rise? Either reading is fine.

  I love the Hoochie Coochie Man because he embraces the idea that sexual prowess is a black maris birthright. But that birthright is not passed on through the genes. The black male collective cocksureness begins at home with the men in the house or the men on the street corner. My own father has always been unabashedly sexual (though also doggedly faithful to my mother). He is the shortest man in his family but has a broad chest and golden skin and exudes such an immense sexual confidence that any thoughts of an Oedipal conflict were crushed before I could walk. Just looking at the way he struts (like many black men), you would think he was quite large. I learned sexual confidence by osmosis.

  But therein lies the untold secret behind the legend of the Big Black Dick. Of course, every single black man is large enough to live up to the stereotype. But the reason why black men, like the Hoochie Coochie Man, stride cocksurely through the American Zeitgeist as its sexual lions is because of the symbolic dick black men have in our minds, what a psychologist might call the sexual ego, the psychic armor that helps us wade through the mud called American white supremacy. In a world that constantly tells us we’re nothing, we tell ourselves we’re great, especially in that most crucial arena, the bed. Whether or not we have the anatomical advantage, the sexual ego gives us the advantage. These are not idle boasts: When we walk down the street like there’s a loaded weapon in our crotch, that’s part of a mental survival strategy to give us armor in a world that seems constructed to destroy us. Armor built from the scraps of racist stereotype. Once again we done made something from nothin’. Now ain’t that the blues?

  BETWEEN MUDDY AND THE WOLF: GUITARIST HUBERT SUMLIN

  By Paul Trynka

  [From Portrait of the Blues, 1996]

  Hubert Sumlin would become Howlin’ Wolf’s greatest collaborator. A young pup who [Wolf] regarded as practically an adopted son, Sumlin had been hanging out in Memphis with James Cotton and Pat Hare before he got the call from Wolf.

  Nowadays Hubert is more or less retired and has moved away from the noise and crime of Chicago up to a peaceful suburban street in Milwaukee. Hubert and Bee Sumlin’s house is brightly painted and looks as if it’s made of gingerbread, with little garden gnomes outside, and an interior filled with cuddly toys and lace. Hubert himself has the friendly, guileless demeanor of a teddy bear and threads his stories with self-deprecating jokes and sneaky metaphors, all of which remind you of his eccentric, mercurial guitar playing. He greets you like an old friend and, after Bee has plied you with coffee and cakes, takes you down to his inner sanctum, where he plays guitar and listens to records late into the night, accompanied only by Lucky, his laid-back and ludicrously fluffy cat. It’s years since he’s had a good talk about Wolf, and he enjoys telling the story, slapping you on the knee to emphasize the good points.

  “I was just a little bitty old boy, and I come by this old warped record in this old garbage pile, and I put this record on and it was so warped, really wooh waaah, I said, ‘Oh, shoot,’ and then it sounded all right. I asked my daddy who it was, and he said, ‘This is a guy died before you was born—Charley Patton.’ Later on, Wolf told me that was how he started out, too, as a little old boy listening to Charley Patton.

  “I played with James Cotton; he had this little band in West Memphis, Arkansas. Wolf was already established, and I was just this little old boy checking him out. Scared me to death, he did. Then one day I’m staying with Cotton at this old hotel, and I get this call from Wolf. He said, ‘Hubert, I’m putting this band down, and I’m going to Chicago and forming me a new group, ‘cos these guys, they think they’re too good, they don’t wanna play, and this and that.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Like that. I didn’t believe him. I really didn’t. So Cotton said, ‘Hey man, you know he meant what he said?’ I said, ‘Hey, I sure hope so.’

  “Sure enough, two weeks later he calls up the hotel, tells me the train leaves at so-and-so time, and you are going to be met by Otis Spann, Muddy Waters’ piano player. And that’s what happened. I packed my little suitcase, gets on the train, and finally arrives at the big ol’ Illinois Station on Twelfth Street. Otis Spann met me, man, I got to see all these big lights, and I got scared, so we went straight back to Leonard Chess’ daddy’s apartment building. Wolf had his own apartment there, he got me an apartment there and had done got my union card and everything. So the second day, me and Wolf we done had lunch and he starts to telling me how this worked, how that worked, and we’re sitting around the apartment going over the numbers, and hey, I got to like that old man. I was kind of scared of him at first, he was so big and huge, you know what I’m talking about, but that didn’t last long-he was just like a little baby if anybody knowed him, man.”

  Wolf ran his band like a machine, dictating what clothes they should wear, paying their union dues, finding them accommodation, and, in Sumlin’s case, organizing guitar lessons: “I had just started playing with him, man, and I wasn’t seasoned good enough, and Wolf said, ‘Hey, Hubert, tomorrow I want you to go with me. I’m gonna show you something I think you are going to like.’ Sure enough, he took me downtown to the Chicago Conservatory of Music, where Wolf took lessons, and then he paid for two years’ lessons for me. It was some opera guitar player, name was Gowalski, he was playing symphonies over in Europe, and now he’s teaching me scales and stuff! ‘Cept I only took six months’ lessons ‘cos the guy dropped dead right in front of me of a heart attack. But hey, with what he taught me and what I knew, I made out.”

  Although Wolf had a reputation in Chicago for whupping any musicians who didn’t toe his line, most musicians who worked with him considered him the best bandleader in the city. Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters’ long-term guitarist, remembers: “Wolf was better at managing a bunch of people than Muddy or anybody else. Muddy would go along with the Chess company, Wolf would speak up for himself—and when you speak up for yourself you’re automatically gonna speak up for the band.” As Billy Boy Arnold, a regular on the Chicago club circuit, puts it: “The difference with Wolf was, if you played in Wolfs band and got fired or quit, you could draw unemployment compensation. If you walked up to Muddy and said something like

  “I could never explain really what seeing Wolf was like. I had his records, 78s, then I walked into a club and find this big man crawling around on his knees, draggin’ his tail and howling like a wolf! Then you hold a conversation with him, and this guy’s not faking this tone of voice, it’s natural, and I’m saying, ‘Oh my God—who am I?’ ‘Cause I knew who he was, and who am I to be talking to him? It’s like, I’m in heaven and I don’t even know it.”—Buddy Guy

  unemployment compensation, they’d think you were crazy—’What the hell’s that?’ Wolf would be sitting in the corner with his spectacles on in intermission, studying his book; he went to night school, he took music lessons, he was always trying to advance.

  “He was a guy stayed on top of things. When you went to see Wolf he would be on that stage kicking ass all night long. I used to play in clubs with Muddy in the late fifties, and Muddy used to let Cotton run his show-he would only come on for the last few numbers. Muddy was a great artist, but he became less of a draw in the Chicago clubs than Wolf, until the white audiences came along and rescued him.”

  As the two leading bandleaders in a city famed for cut-throat musical competition, it was inevitable that Waters’ a
nd Wolf’s rivalry would develop into open enmity. Waters had originally welcomed Wolf, but by the mid-fifties, the King of Chicago Blues was becoming increasingly fearful that Wolf would steal his crown. “Muddy and Wolf, they really had a feud going,” says Sumlin. “Those two were just like the McCoys, man!” The rivalry extended to arguments over who got the best songs from the Chess house songwriter, Willie Dixon, and constant attempts to poach the other’s best musicians. In 1956 Waters pulled off a particularly satisfying coup. “We were playing the Zanzibar,” says Sumlin, “and Muddy sent his chauffeur over in his Cadillac, the chauffeur had on diamonds and everything, and I am looking at this big roll of money. I ain’t saw so much in all my days. Muddy done sent him over there to bribe me, man! He’s telling me, ‘Muddy say he’ll triple the money that Wolf paying you, what do you want to do?’

  “ ‘Course when you’re young you think money’s everything, so I say all right, and I’m wondering how am I gonna tell Wolf. I got this money, four hundred and something dollars, and it is ten minutes before we get ready to go back on the bandstand. The place is full of folk, jammed, so I goes in the bathroom to count my money and to think about what I am going to tell him. Shoot, man, Wolf comes straight in there, and he done change colors, man–he got blacker! This guy got a ton of color I ain’t never seen a man turn. I say, ‘Oh shit, he is gonna kill me, man!’ I didn’t have to tell him ‘bout how I was going with Mud, the guy knew already. He says to me, ‘Get out of my sight, get your stuff off the bandstand now.’ In the middle of the show! I takes my shit down, scared, trembling, just knowing I’m gonna get bopped any minute, and get out of there quick as I can. Mud’s chauffeur must have had an idea what was going on, he’s waiting on me outside, helps me put my amplifier in the trunk, and drives me over to Sylvio’s, where Muddy is at. Man, I cried a-a-a-all the way over there.”

  From the moment he joined the Waters camp, Sumlin started to miss Wolf’s comparatively well-organized outfit, not least when the Waters band set out on an arduous tour of the South: “Mud told me we were leaving town, we’re fixing to leave and he asked me did I have enough clothes. I said, Sure. I had me one suit. He said, ‘Is that all you got, just that one suit? You know we gonna be away about forty days?’ I’m going, ‘What the … This man ain’t told me nothing about no forty days.’ Man, that forty days like to kill me. Some of them jobs was one thousand miles apart, man, nothing under five hundred miles, twenty days out of the forty didn’t nobody get a chance to take a bath, ‘cos by the time we arrive in the next town, it’s time to play. Man, we did so much driving, I got the hemorrhoids so bad I couldn’t sit down! They brought me feather pillows that I had to sit on!

  “We drove about fourteen hundred miles back to Chicago, and the moment I got back in town, I called Wolf; I said, ‘I got the hemorrhoids, this guy done work me forty days and forty nights. I am quitting Mud, and I wanna go back with you.’ He said, ‘You say you’re comin’ back?’ I said, ‘I’ll be there in three minutes, man,’“

  ME AND BIG JOE

  By Michael Bloom field [with S. Summerville]

  [An excerpt from Me and Big Joe, 1980]

  It was the early sixties at a Chicago nightclub called the Blind Pig that I first met Joe Lee Williams. He was a short and stout and heavy-chested man, and he was old even then. He wore cowboy boots and cowboy hat and pleated pants pulled way up high, almost to his armpits. Just visible above the pants was a clean white shirt, and a tiny blue bow tie decorated his bullish neck. He played a nine-string Silvertone guitar and to keep others from copying his style he’d put it up in a very strange tuning. I was familiar with all stringed instruments and eventually worked that guitar every way possible, but I never learned to play it and to this day don’t know the tuning he used.

  Big Joe, as he was often called, had been a well-known artist in the thirties and forties and wrote one of the real standards in the blues field, “(Baby) Please Don’t Go,” a song later cut by, among others, Mose Allison and Muddy Waters. At the time I met Joe Lee I was trying to meet as many blues artists as were alive in America, because music was the field I most wanted to pursue, and blues was the music I most wanted to learn. So between sets that night I talked with Joe, or at least I tried to—he lacked teeth and had a thick piney-woods accent, and at first I found him nearly indecipherable. I had to ask him to repeat himself over and over, but he didn’t seem to mind and after a while I caught on somewhat to his speech. He told me Crawford, Mississippi, was his birthplace, and that since the early thirties he’d done nothing but hobo around the country with his guitar. Now, most bluesmen I’d met had two jobs—they’d play and sing nighttimes, but during the day they kept up a straight gig of one kind or another. But Joe never did that—he traveled and he played, and that was it.

  Joe and I got along well that night, and as he packed his guitar away after his last set he invited me to visit him sometime.

  D rive me down by Gary,” Joe said one day, “and I’ll carry you to see Lightnin’ Hopkins—him an’ me is old, old friends.” So Joe and I and [harmonica player] Charlie Musselwhite and Roy Ruby, who for a time played bass with Barry Goldberg and Steve Miller, climbed into Roy’s car and headed east to Indiana. Actually, we had to go out beyond Gary, into the countryside, where eventually we came to a barbeque pit, or roadhouse. This kind of place was also known as a barrelhouse or chockhouse, and seems to have pretty much disappeared from the North, and maybe the South, too. The roadhouse was run by an older black couple and consisted of a barbeque pit in front and a large bare room in back. This back room was heated only by body heat—when there were enough people in the room, the place got warm. And that night it was hot.

  Joe had gotten himself a center seat and was buying drinks and ordering people around when the opening act, J.B. Lenoir and His Big Band, came on. J.B. was a short man in a zebra-striped coat that hung down low behind him. He had straight hair, but it wasn’t up in a high process, it was slicked down flat against his head. He looked a little like a seal. The band he had backing him featured three horn players of such advanced stages of age and inebriation that they had to lean against one another to avoid collapse. J.B. played guitar and sang through a microphone on a rack around his neck. He had a high, almost feminine voice and was a fine singer. He danced through the crowd as he played and sang, and Joe sat nodding his approval—he liked J.B. quite a bit. Then old Lightnin’ came on, and he was as sly and slick and devilish as a man could be. He had a real high black conk on his head and wore black, wraparound shades. He had only a drummer behind him, and when the blue lights hit that conk-man, that was all she wrote. Lightnin’ ran his numbers and everything was cool.

  When the set ended, Joe went over to Lightnin’ to say hello, but before he could get a word out, Lightnin’ said, “What are you doing down here? I’m the star of this show, you know.” “I know you’re the star,” Joe replied, “and we don’t mean no trouble. I carried these white boys down here tonight to see you, and I just wanted to pay my respects.” So Lightnin’ mellowed and bought Joe a drink, but that was a mistake, because Joe didn’t need it. Sure enough, Joe got rummed out and quarreled with Lightnin’, and we were turned out of the place. When we got to the car, Charlie hustled into the back seat and pretended to fall asleep. I rode shotgun and feigned sleep, too. Roy was driving and Joe was between us, trying to direct Roy where to carry him. Joe was hard enough to understand sober, but drunk you had no chance at all—it was just syllabic noise.

  What Joe had a penchant for doing when he was drunk was to look up distant relatives of his, sisters-in-law or whatever, and see if their husbands were working a nightshift so he could screw their women. So he had us driving through all the ghetto areas of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago, ranting and roaring at Roy, who was unable to understand a word of what he was saying—he might well have been speaking Tagalog. And Roy would look over and say, “Michael! I know you’re not asleep–you’ve got to tell me how to get home!” And

  “I noticed it
with the Rolling Stones, Butterfield, Bloomfield, and others: If they’d had their wish, they would have been black to sound identical to those Chess Records that they were covering onstage. But it came out their way. They just added that little bit of whiteness to it, and that little bit of their way really made it [expand] into the white market.”-Marshall Chess

  Big Joe Williams posed for this photo in 1967, around the time that he held Bloomfield and his pals “captive.”

  Michael Bloomfield loved playing—and writing about—blues.

  when I wouldn’t respond he’d turn to Charlie and say, “Charlie, goddammit, wake up—you gotta show us how to get out of here!” But Charlie’d just lie low, too. Joe’s eyes were tiny, squinchy red slits, and we weren’t about to go up against that moaning, cursing, grousing, heaving, indecipherable angriness. If Joe wasn’t ready to return to Chicago, that was it—we weren’t going. And we didn’t—not that night, anyway. But as dawn finally broke over the smokestacks and railyards and cracking towers of northern Indiana, Joe directed Roy home.

  Around the Fourth of July, Joe took it into his head to visit some people of his down in St. Louis. The owner of the record store [where Joe lived in the basement] thought it was a good idea. “Yeah, Joe,” he said, “you go down there and be a talent scout. Take a tape recorder along and say you represent my company. Record some people, see what kind of deal we can make, and bring back some tapes.”