Out In The Delta Night-With Legendary Bluesman Muddy Waters In Mind

By Lester Lannon

 

Bart Webber was a late-comer to the world of the blues, you know, the music that came via Mother Africa beat from down in the Delta, out in the Piedmont and along the Alabama crescent. He had missed capturing that sound deep in his head although he probably had heard some riffs accidently or sub-consciously in some way until the early 1970s having previously been deeply emerged in the rock and roll of his youth down in Riverdale south of Boston and later by the “acid” rock of his young adulthood. Guys like Johnny Winters and John Mayall, gals like Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin probably entered his universe without being tagged as from down in Delta, Piedmont, Crescent land. His tutor in all things blues (and of folk of which it could be have been argued, and has been blues, is a integral  part of) Sam Lowell introduced him to the genre one night in Cambridge at Jack’s, the then famous blues room, after they had not seen each other for a while. And that would be a main subject of conversation thereafter when the met at any gin mill.

That “not having seen each other for a while” being the direct result of Bart’s coming back from the West Coast about a year earlier to open up a small printing shop in Riverdale in the old Lawrence Lowell Building just off downtown and Sam’s, also back from the Coast about the same time, beginning his second year of law school in Boston at Suffolk Law School. As old-time high school friends they had drifted out to California, draft exempt respectively for an exemption as sole support of his family after his father passed away and as physically unfit for military, along with a couple of other guys from Riverdale, Jack Callahan and Frankie Riley, and about a million young people from everywhere trying to find some meaning to their lives, at least that was the quest, that is what Bart and Sam thought they were doing. Once Sam was safely through L1 he called Bart up and they had begun once again their youthful searches for the meaning of everything musical.  

For those not familiar with Cambridge, those not familiar with Harvard Square in the folk pantheon, and those not familiar with the early link-up between traditional folk music from the mountains like East Virginia and Tom Doulas and such classic blues tunes as Mississippi Fred McDowell’s Got To Move and 61 Highway and Bukka White’s Panama Limited Jack’s was the place more so than the Club Blue and Café Nana further up the street where hot blues was played. The place too where you could heard a young Bonnie Raitt now that we are name-dropping working out the kinks in her material, working out her thirst, and working out her entrée into the blues world in those days in the 1960s when Sam, before he headed out west with an important segment of his generation, immersed himself in the genre. He would mention some stuff to Bart, as always, whenever he thought he could get the musical upper-hand on Bart. Bart had been way ahead of him on the classic rock, you know, Elvis, Carl, Buddy, Chuck and Jerry Lee but Sam had chipped away at that lead with the advent of the Stones and was eons ahead once the folk and blues milieus came into some fashion among the hipsters of Cambridge and the diaspora.

That night we are talking about, the night of the meeting at Jack’s, with both men safely drinking their whiskies and scotches in lieu of the less public hash pipe, ganga gong, or dixie cup. (You figure out that usage if you are too forgetful, or too young just Google Tom Wolfe and you will link straight to the reference.) Sam started a conversation by telling Bart that he remembered back in the day when he had heard Howlin’ Wolf, the mad monk Chicago bluesman, who had practically eaten his harmonica on a song called How Many More Years (are you going to dog me around-a very good question that any righteous man is entitled to ask his, ah, temperamental lady when she is giving nothing, nothing but heartache and the runaround) get down and dirty on a Willie Dixon song, Little Red Rooster, long after he had heard the Stones do their cover of the song which many radio stations around Riverdale refused to play on the air for its allegedly suggestive sexual references having nothing to do with roosters or barnyards. He had been “blown away” by the Wolf’s version. What he had to tell Bart that night was that he had just heard a record where a couple of the Stones, probably Keith Richards and Ronnie Woods, sitting at the feet of the Wolf learning how to play, really play that song rather than their white bread, white boy version. Hot stuff.                  

That gave Bart just the opportunity he was looking for to bring up his “difference” with Sam about who was the “max daddy” bluesman, the electric Chicago blues version not that of the down country  guys like Son House and Skip James. And that difference turned on his much greater preference for the more sultry blues beat of Mister Muddy Waters who never almost “ate” his own harmonica since he had hired help like James Cotton and Junior Wells to handle that chore. Naturally Bart always pointed to Muddy’s Hoochie Goochie Man as far superior to the gruntings of the Wolf, who in Bart’s mind had never really got the mud of the Delta off his boots.

Of course Sam, once cornered by Bart, once he knew Bart was on the war-path about the blues and who was who, aided no little by those bar whiskies and scotches, had to come back on him with that story about how the Stones when they were on one of the their early United States tours had made the pilgrimage to Chicago, to Chess Records, in those days the Mecca for Chicago blues (and incidentally a record company owned by Marshal Press’ father and uncle who just happened to be the Stones’ road manager at that point) and Muddy Waters having seen the boys come in for a look volunteered to bring their luggage in. Wolf would have left the damn luggage float up Division Street before he would bend to such indignities.            

Bart, not to be outdone in the urban legend department (urban legend about Muddy toting anybody’s luggage much less the Stones who at that point he would probably not even known about, much less that they were crazy for his music) came back on Sam hard with the facts and figures about how many “lady friends” Muddy had hanging around for his pleasure, including a few times, one at one table and another a few tables away. Of course there were rumors around that Wolf refused any advances by the enraptured females, black and white, in his audiences leading to the charges that he was “light on his feet.”  (Another urban legend since Mrs. Burnet, Wolf’s real last name stayed at home taking care of business in the knowledge that her Chester was working and not working out if you get the drift.)       

A few more whiskies and scotches would surely have Sam and Bart at each other’s throats talking heatedly about whether Hubert Sumelin added more to Wolf’s entourage than Junior Wells’ to Muddy’s. It would be a knock-down, drag-out fight from there. Sam must have wondered on such nights about the monster he had brought forth unto the world. Amen, brother, amen.