Great Blues Albums: Muddy Waters, The Real Folk Blues

The Real Folk Blues, released in 1966, is a combination of twelve of Muddy Waters’ recordings from 1949 to 1954, but it’s all quality stuff and the album was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2017 as a “Classic of Blues Recordings.”

Chess took the opportunity with the folk and blues revivals of the early sixties to promote Muddy to a new and younger generation of music fans, his last chart hit with Chess having been in 1958. In 1964, they released Waters’ only acoustic album, Folk Singer, and then, two years later, The Real Folk Blues.

The album includes Canary Bird, named in honour of his wife, Geneva, and originally released on the Aristocrat label in 1949 with Ernest “Big” Crawford on bass. As well as Clarksdale, the song mentions Stovall Plantation, where Muddy Waters lived in a sharecropper’s shack for the first thirty years of his life. It’s delightfully raw, with Waters’ voice to the fore.

Another early song is Gypsy Woman, from 1947, which features Sunnyland Slim on piano. There’s a definite Robert Johnson feel about this one, both in terms of the blues turnarounds and Water’s singing. As there is in an early Water’s version of Johnson’s Walking Blues, sparsely arranged with just his singing and characteristic slide guitar.

The album kicks off with Mannish Boy, first recorded in 1955, with that famous harmonica lick. The song is a classic, included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” “I’m a man,” Muddy asserts, “I’m a full grown man.” Like most African Americans of his day, Muddy Waters had still been referred to as a boy even when grown, especially in his native Mississippi. “No b-o-y,” he sings – now free of the extreme Southern racism and oppression and a successful musician in Chicago, Muddy Waters could assert his black manhood. (For more on the song Mannish Boy, click here.]

Screaming and Crying recorded in September 1949, featured “Baby Face” Leroy Foster who played guitar with his hands, and bass drum and hi-hat with his feet! It’s a nice slow tempo blues driven by Little Johnny Jones’s rolling piano, where Muddy bemoans the loss of his past life, his mother, his wives and his happy home. It’s truly the blues!

There is a 1950 version of Rollin’ And Tumblin’, a blues standard, first recorded in 1929 by  Hambone Willie Newbern for Okeh Records. This is the song that Robert Johnson adapted as If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day in 1936 in his third recording session in San Antonio. Waters recorded two versions of the song in 1950 and I believe this is the one recorded for Aristocat, with the bass accompaniment by Ernest Crawford. Subsequent rock takes on the song, like Cream’s, are based on Muddy Waters.

Willie Dixon’s The Same Thing is another fine inclusion, featuring Otis Spann on piano and Dixon on bass, as is the classic Just To Be With You, with great lines like “[I will] Fight a shark with a toothpick,” and “I’d call my mother-in-law honey.”

The album closes with You Can’t Lose What You Never Had, another one with loss after loss – woman, money, burned-down home – piling up to deliver the blues. It features some tasty slide guitar from Muddy and is a fine way to finish what amounts to a classic – and quality –  collection of early Muddy Waters’ recordings.

Great Blues Albums: Willie Dixon, I Am The Blues

Along with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon defined the sound of Chicago blues. A prolific song-writer, particularly during the years when Chess Records were at their peak, his songs were performed by a who’s who of blues royalty, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. His Little Red Rooster and I Just Want to Make Love to You were both recorded by the Rolling Stones, the former with the distinction of being the only blues song to reach No.1 on the UK singles charts (1964).

Willie Dixon knew what the blues were all about, having been incarcerated for minor offences on two occasions in Mississippi, the first when he was only 12. In his book, I Am the Blues. he says, “That’s when I really learned about the blues. I had heard ’em with the music and took ’em to be an enjoyable thing but after I heard these guys down there moaning and groaning these really down-to-earth blues, I began to inquire about ’em…. I really began to find out what the blues meant to black people, how it gave them consolation to be able to think these things over and sing them to themselves or let other people know what they had in mind and how they resented various things in life.”

On another occasion, Dixon served thirty days at the Harvey Allen County Farm, near the infamous Parchman Farm prison, he saw prisoners mistreated and beaten. Those, he said who were “running the farm didn’t have no mercy – you talk about mean, ignorant, evil, stupid and crazy. This was the first time I saw a man beat to death.” Dixon too was cruelly treated receiving a blow to his head that made him deaf for about four years.

Dixon arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1936, and after a boxing career, singing in a gospel group and in a successful trio, he ended up working for Chess Records, producing, arranging, leading the studio band, and playing bass. His first big break came when Muddy Waters recorded his Hoochie Coochie Man in 1954, which became his biggest hit, Dixon going on to become Chess’s top song-writer.

Dixon eventually recorded his own version of some of these blues songs that he’d written for others to perform in his 6^th album in 1970, an album which eventually was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986. I Am The Blues, which shares the title with Dixon’s autobiography, has nine of Dixon’s best songs, including Hoochie Coochie Man, Spoonful, Little Red Rooster and I Can’t Quit You Baby.

Produced by Abner Spector, the album features Willie Dixon (vocals and bass), Walter Horton (harmonica), Lafayette Leake & Sunnyland Slim (Piano), Johnny Shines (guitar), and Clifton James (drums).

Dixon proves himself to be a fine blues vocalist throughout. He arrives growling, Howlin’ Wolf-style, on the first track, Back Door Man, shows fine control on the slow I Can’t Quit You Baby, adds a playful note on The Seventh Son, and gives The Little Red Rooster a nice barnyard feel. You don’t feel in any way like you’re short changed from versions of songs by the artists who made the songs famous.

The arrangements throughout give room for each of the fine instrumentalists. Lafayette Leake’s and Sunnyland Slim’s piano work is very cool and never feels overbearing. The piano and bass driving Hoochie Coochie Man gives it a slightly different feel from the Muddy Waters version, and provides a nice counterpoint to the harmonica riff. Walter Horton’s expressive and sweet harmonica weaves in an out of the songs expertly – Dixon said the shy, gentle Horton was the best harmonica player he ever heard. Johnny Shines adds some nice guitar work along the way, especially on I Can’t Quit You Baby and The Same Thing.

Overall, it’s classic Chicago blues, with artists at the top of their game, seemingly really enjoying themselves in the recording process. It’s a piece of blues – and indeed, given the debt it owes to Willie Dixon, rock’n’roll history.

Dixon once said, “The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits…The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.”

Dixon’s legacy is found not only in the blues songs he composed recorded by the likes of Waters and Wolf, or in this gem of an album we’ve been looking at, but in the way his songs were covered by major rock’n’roll artists and influenced their output.

Quite rightly, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. In 2007, Dixon was honoured with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Vicksburg.

The blues, honesty and truth

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“The blues is the truth,” said Willie Dixon, famously. “The blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.”

One the one hand, the blues have always been entertainment, music to dance to, but it’s essentially music that is rooted in hard times, trouble and suffering. Which Dixon understood well. Born in Vicksburg in 1915 in a household of 14 children, his family lived in what he described as a “raggedy” house. Even worse was where he ended up aged eleven after running away from home – “man, you’re talking about a shack… the house [I stayed] in had great big holes in the floor.” Trying to steal some fixtures from an old derelict house got him sent to a jail-farm when he was twelve where he said, “That’s when I really learned about the blues. I had heard ’em with the music and took ’em to be an enjoyable thing but after I heard these guys down there moaning and groaning these really down-to-earth blues…I really began to find out what the blues meant to black people.”

On another occasion, for a petty charge, Dixon served thirty days at the Harvey Allen County Farm, near the infamous Parchman Farm prison, where the treatment of prisoners was inhumane – “this was the first time I saw a man beat to death,” he said. Dixon himself was brutalized, receiving a blow to his head that made him deaf for about four years. Dixon, in short, knew all about the truth of the blues.

Early blues songs covered the whole gamut of real-life problems and hardships faced by black communities – ill-health, poverty, homelessness, discrimination, police brutality, as well as the vagaries of romantic love. Here’s Victoria Spivey with TB Blues, tuberculosis being a disease particularly associated with poverty:

There’s no hiding from the realities of life with the blues. As slide guitarist Bryn Haworth told me recently, “Blues music to me is honest music. It’s people expressing their sorrow, their pain, their loneliness, their disconnectedness, their questions or anger about things we all feel…It’s honest…honest to God music, really.”

The blues face life head on, honestly, and somehow, often seem to enable a way through, because of that honesty. Honesty, however, seems to be a quality in short supply these days.

Tell the Truth, written by Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton, was recorded by Derek and the Dominos in August 1970, and appeared on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Whitlock has described it as a kind of coming of age song, a reminiscence about getting older, but as you listen to the lyrics today, it sounds like a social commentary on the descent of today’s world into double-speak and deceit:

Tell the truth.
Tell me who’s been fooling you?
Tell the truth.
Who’s been fooling who?

It doesn’t matter just who you are,
Or where you’re going or been…

The whole world is shaking now. Can’t you feel it?

Back in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was published under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, and portrays a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Orwell said he was worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Would he have been surprised at where we have reached in today’s world, where the bare-faced lie has become perfectly acceptable and truth in the public sphere scarcely seems to matter?

Robert Musil, the author of the classic The Man Without Qualities in the mid-1930s, wrote, “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” And yet here we are. Donald Trump is in the White House, telling more lies each day than you wash your hands (according to CNN, June 2019) – as of June 7 2019, his 869th day in office, the president had made 10,796 false or misleading claims, according to Washington Post’s the Fact Checker’s database. And UK Tories have just installed Boris Johnson as the country’s Prime Minister, a man with a long and well-documented history of playing fast and loose with the truth (as reported by the Independent) – from his days as a journalist with the Times and the Daily Telegraph to backing the infamous claim on the side of the bus that the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU, followed by “let’s fund our NHS instead” during the Brexit referendum campaign.

As Roger Cohen put it recently, “The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.”

Of all the disturbing aspects of the rise of petty nationalism and populism which has given rise to racism, xenophobia and increasing polarisation, it is the assault on truth which is perhaps the most undermining of life as we know it. I watched a clip on an US TV programme recently where a woman was asked about Trump’s recorded statement that he could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters, and she dismissed it out of hand as “fake news” from the dishonest media. Up is down; black is white; I only believe what fits my viewpoint.

But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator, famously observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That has become almost quaint, so far down the road have we come. Johnson and Trump do not exist in a vacuum; the dishonesty which pervades public life at the highest levels seeps out through elements of the media into the public square and into the lives of individuals. Truth has become devalued and our societies imperilled because of it. As the ancient prophets of Israel said, “Truth has stumbled in the street” (Isaiah 59.14) and “lies and not truth prevail in the land” (Jeremiah 9.3).

We’re grateful for courageous reporters, broadcasters, church leaders and others who speak truth to power, expose lying and call out dishonest leadership. And with a continuous stream of properly fake news, we need to take care what we are prepared to believe. As psychologist Jordan Peterson says, “The small sins of the individual culminate into the great sins of the state.”

Dishonesty is a temptation for us all. Fyodor Dostoevsky warns us in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that not to tell the truth risks us losing our sense of reality. To lose the truth is to lose your soul. “Above all,” says Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima, “don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

Lies and deceit eat away at the fabric of our being. They are truly destructive, each lie causing a little more damage to our characters, until we can scarcely tell truth from untruth.

On the other hand, when you tell the truth, “Everything begins to come together…when you’re around someone who tells the truth everything comes together and that’s the potential destiny of the world…you can bring forth something again to paradise by speaking the truth and you can start in your own life, and in the lives of your own family…It’s the proper way of wending your way through the terrible world without making it worse than it already is and with the possibility perhaps of making it better.”

Someone famously said, “Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth – to see it as it is, and tell it like it is – to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.” Words to live by – despite the salutary fact that this came from Richard Nixon on the occasion of his acceptance of the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968. The danger of ignoring the advice writ large.

More importantly, two thousand years ago, someone said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” As we discover in the authenticity of the blues, there is something about truth telling that does indeed set us free. Something about facing the realities of the world and our troubles face-on that is the first step to freedom. There’s a deeper freedom than that, though – as a provincial governor found out a long time ago when he faced his prisoner and asked, “What is truth?” There was no answer because the living embodiment of that was standing in front of him.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Gospel of St. John)