Here’s a 12 minute interview I did with the BBC about my book, The Gospel According to the Blues.
Just click on the picture below…
BBC Radio Interview with Gary Burnett
You can get a copy of the book in either Kindle or paperback edition at Amazon.
Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield sometime around 1915 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Raised by his grandmother, Della Grant in Clarksdale after his mother died when he was three, he lived in a shack on Stovall Plantation, working as a farm laborer from when he was a boy. Life was harsh, brutal even, with poverty and deprivation part of daily life. Muddy Water’s website notes that blues artists like Muddy “gave vent to…terror, frustration, rage and passionate humanity in a music that was taut with dark, brooding force and spellbinding intensity that was jagged, harsh, raw as an open wound and profoundly, inexorably, moving.”
Muddy began playing harmonica, then guitar and by 17, he was playing at parties, seeking to emulate his heroes, Son House and Robert Johnson. Within ten years he had moved to Chicago, where he became a full-time professional musician, and in due course a huge success and the acknowledged father of Chicago blues.
With all his success, however, and ability to broaden his musical horizon to include new musical sounds and approaches, not least the amplified electric guitar, Muddy’s early years in the Delta clearly remained formative – take his 1959 Single Version of Take the Bitter With The Sweet, where he remembers the struggles and difficulties of growing up in poverty. He sings about the pain of not having any family:
Well I don’t have no mother, father, brother, sister, boy, I ain’t never seen
Well you know sometime I feel so lonesome
Well yes I feel just like I wanna scream..
He remembers the times when “There’ve been nights I’ve laid down, And I didn’t have no food to eat,” and the days he walked around and “I didn’t have no shoes on my feet.”
The song, interestingly concludes with the line “Oh Lord, boy I gotta take the bitter with the sweet,” which is a surprisingly upbeat and positive take on the woes that he’s just been singing about.
Even those of us who are fortunate enough not to live in poverty and don’t have to worry about where we’re going to sleep tonight know that life has a way of throwing some bitter pills at us from time to time. I’m just recovering from a lengthy period of ill health, and many of us know about job loss, bereavement, financial worries, family problems. None of us is immune from the trouble that life brings no matter who we are, no matter how wealthy we are or how strong and fit we are.
We hear a lot about life’s woes in Israel’s blues songbook, the Psalms – we regularly read about “the day of trouble,” “the time of trouble,” about “afflictions” and a whole host of difficulties. What is remarkable, though, is the confidence that the writers of the Psalms had that God would be with them in the day of trouble – “When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble; I will rescue them.” (Ps. 91.15). Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann commenting on these Psalms says that “The songs are not about the “natural” outcome of trouble, but about the decisive transformation made possible by this God who causes new life where none seems possible.” Psalms like Psalms 30, 34, 40, 138 all tell stories of going into trouble and coming out the other side.
Like these Psalms which look for a better day beyond the day of trouble, many blues songs also hit this note of hope for better things. For sure there’s no way we can avoid the bitter – we gotta take it along with the sweet – but the question for all of us is: in the day of trouble, who you gonna turn to? Who are you gonna hope in? The Psalms give us a good steer here – “my help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Maybe we’ll leave the last word on this to Eric Bibb…
Muddy Waters first recorded Mannish Boy back in 1955. He and Willie Dixon had previously written Hoochie Coochie Man, which had inspired Bo Diddley‘s I’m a Man,and which in turn provided the basis for Mannish Boy. The song is credited to Muddy Water, Mel London and Bo Diddley, and features a repeating lick based on one chord.
Waters recorded Mannish Boy on several occasions – in 1968, for the Electric Mud album, in 1977 for the Hard Again album, and on the 1979 live album Muddy “Mississippi” Waters – Live. Muddy can also be seen performing it on The Band‘s The Last Waltz film.
The song has become something of a blues standard, having reached number 5 in the Billboard R&B chart when first released. It was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame “Classics of Blues Recordings” category, as well as being included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame‘s list of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll,” and was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine in its list of “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.
The song is basically a raunchy number, both musically and lyrically, full of male sexual bravado. When Muddy sings “I’m a natural born lover,” and “I passed 21, I want you to believe me baby, I had lots of fun,” and “I’m made to move you honey,” there’s really no doubt as to what he’s talking about. He also says he’s a “hoochie coochie man” – the hoochie coochie was a sexually provocative dance that became wildly popular in Chicago in the late nineteenth century. The dance was performed by women, so a “hoochie coochie man” either watched them or ran the show.
The song’s chorus goes:
I’m a man
Spell M-A child -N
That represents man
No B-O child -Y
That mean mannish boy.
And then goes on to assert “I’m a man, I’m a full grown man.”
Despite the clear sensuality of the song, there’s something more going on in the song. In the Southern states under Jim Crow, including Mississippi where Muddy Waters grew up, a black man was never recognized as anything other than a “boy.”
Fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1853, Thomas Bailey, a southern educator set forth fifteen major premises of the “common opinion of the South” of black Americans. Two of these said, “The negro is inferior and will remain so,” and “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.” African Americans were both demonized and dehumanized. A white student in 1909 – shockingly – wrote, “The negro is more like a mule than anything I can think of…You cannot get the brute out of the negro; therefore he must be kept under subjection.”
Such were the attitudes that Muddy Waters experienced growing up in Mississippi. As a black man, he was considered and treated as less than human, and one of the ways in which this was reinforced was in the way in which he would never be referred to as a man – always as “boy.” Blacks at best were children, to be looked after, provided of course they knew their place, behaved and did not become “uppity.” At worst black men were considered a source of danger to white womanhood, ready at any opportunity to act as crazed, ravishers of pure white women. On this basis, many of the atrocious lynchings that mark the Jim Crow period in the South took place.
Muddy Water’s song, then, takes on a new meaning in this context. Now that he’s free of Southern racism and oppression and is a successful musician in Chicago, Muddy can assert his black manhood – “I’m a man, I’m a full grown man,” sings Muddy, “I spell M-A, child, N.” And free from the accusations of sexual misconduct, the sexual bravado of the song becomes at least understandable.
Despite the complicity of the white Christian church in years of racism in the South, the gospel is the message of God’s unconditional love for all God’s children, irrespective of race or social position. Before God we’re all the same, common humanity, with the same problems and the same potential. St. Paul lived in a world in the first century where the dividing line was between Jews and Gentiles. He wrote two of his letters to help groups of the first Christians to understand that there need be no difference between people. To the Galatians he wrote, “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile,” and to the Romans he took a great deal of time to explain that nobody, whether Jew or Gentile, had any rights before God and that everybody was made right on the same basis of their devotion to the Messiah Jesus. Nothing, he said, could separate us from God’s love.
No one has the right to dominate or oppress others on any basis. To do so flies in the face of the God in whose image we are made. We each have an intrinsic worth – because God loves us. The truth is we need each other to survive and to thrive. We are human because we belong to each other, we participate together and we share together.
Inequality due to racism clearly still exists; but our societies also suffer because of inequality due to aggressive competitiveness, and political and economic structures that result in large numbers of people – even in the US and Europe – suffering hardship and lack of opportunity. In the US, 95% of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent and the top 1% of Americans take home 22% of the nation’s income. Christians need to be in the vanguard of those seeking change in our society and the wider world – as those who will take a stand for our common humanity and against whatever it is that drives a wedge between us.
