Growing Popular Culture: Muddy Waters and Langston
Hughes Spreading the Blues
A Gloomy Day in Newport
“It’s a gloomy day at Newport, It’s a gloomy,
gloomy day.
It’s a gloomy day at Newport, My music’s going
away.
What’s gonna happen to my music? What’s gonna
happen to my song?”[i]
Otis
Spann, pianist for the Muddy Waters Band, sang the lines of the song that poet
and Newport Jazz Festival board member,[ii]
Langston Hughes had written on the back of a Western Union telegram sheet.[iii]
It was the final song of the blues music session scheduled for Sunday
afternoon, July 3, 1960. The Jazz Festival was cut short after thousands of people
rioted because they could not get into the Jazz Festival at Freebody Park,
Newport on the previous day.[iv]
The National Guard and state police were called in to quell the riot.[v]
Muddy Waters was the final act of a blues session organized by Hughes to bring
blues to a white audience. The blues session is considered the first time that
blues was played for a large white audience. According to David Whiteis, Muddy Waters’s
performance at Newport “ranks as one of the most culturally and musically significant
moments of the 20th century.”[vi]
The Sunday blues
performances included the Sammy Price Trio, Betty Jeanette, Al and Leone, John
Lee Hooker, Butch Cage and Willie Thomas, Myra Johnson, and the Muddy Waters Band.
Interspersed into the musical performance was an educational program that
included Langston Hughes's “Narrating the Blues.” [vii]
During “Narrating the Blues” Hughes used
a call-and-response format asking questions that another performer would
answer. In this way, Hughes defined and described blues music to the audience.
For example,
Langston Hughes: “Sammy,
what are the blues?”
Answer: “The blues ain’t
nothin’ but the dog-gone hear disease.”
Langston Hughes:
“Lafayette, what’s the blues?”
Answer: “The blues ain’t
nothing but a good man feelin’ bad.”
Langston Hughes:
“Drummer man, what is the blues?”
Answer: “The blues ain’t
nothin’ but wantin’ what you never had.”
Langston Hughes: “Betty
Jeanette, tellin me, what are the blues?”
Answer: “Blues ain’t
nothing but a good woman been done wrong.”
Through the call and
response, Hughes demonstrated the sense of melancholy[viii]
that “captured the suffering, anguish-and-hopes-of 300 years of slavery and
tenant farming”[ix] that
characterized Blues lyrics. If “Narrating the Blues” provided the audience with
an introduction to the lyrical themes of the blues, the Sunday performance by
the various blues musicians accomplished Hughes’s goal to promote
“African-American culture through music” which was one of the reasons he became
involved with the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956.[x]
The Muddy Waters Band
was the final act of the Sunday Blues performance. Chess Records released the
performance as a live album, Muddy Waters at Newport 1960 and included many
of his hits from the 1950s including “Hoochie Coochie Man” (1954) and “I got my
Mojo Working” (1957). The final song of the album is “Goodbye Newport Blues”
which was written by Hughes and performed by the Muddy Waters Band.[xi]
The Newport Jazz Festival not only introduced the Blues to white America but
according to Gary Blailock, Muddy “Waters and his band unleash(ed) the full
force of the blues on a transfixed audience.”[xii]
Blailock’s assessment can be confirmed by listening to the full album or
watching videos of the performance that are readily available on the internet.
Hughes’s goal was to introduce the Blues and Waters to a larger audience and
after Newport, his audience included white fans of Jazz music.[xiii]
Further, his performance resulted in young whites in America “embracing the
blues.”[xiv]
Taking the Delta Blues to Chicago and
beyond
Muddy Waters[xv]
was born at Jug’s Corner in Issaquena County Mississippi[xvi]
in 1913.[xvii]
The date of his birth has been reported as 1913, 1914, and 1915 by various
sources. Alan Lomax recorded the year of his birth as 1913 in his 1941
interview with Waters.[xviii]
In his interview with Lomax, Waters stated that he learned how to play guitar
from legendary blues artist Son House and reported that his yearly income
working as a sharecropper was less than $250.[xix]
Lomax was traveling the deep south for the Library of Congress recording folk
music in 1941 and 1942.[xx]
Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters in August 1941 and July 1942. These recordings
are available on The Complete Plantation Recordings Muddy Waters.[xxi]
In one way the songs on the recordings are different from the songs he would
later record in Chicago in that Waters is playing an acoustic guitar (as you
will see below, Waters traded in his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar in
Chicago). But the theme of disappointment and loss is evident. For example,
after Waters played the first song “Country Blues,” Lomax asked him why he
wrote the song. Muddy Waters replied that he “had been mistreated by a girl…”
and “I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind.”[xxii]
After the second interview with Lomax, Waters determined that he could be a
professional musician and followed other black Mississippians' example and
migrated north to Chicago in 1943.[xxiii]
In Chicago, Muddy Waters modified his Delta Blues sound when
he exchanged his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar. In some accounts he
bought his first electric guitar in 1944[xxiv]
others state that his uncle gave him an electric guitar.[xxv]
According to Michael Hill, he made the switch because he “found he couldn’t
command much attention unamplified in a crowded, noisy club.”[xxvi]
It was this new electric sound that brought Muddy Waters commercial success
leading to 16 hits on the R&B charts by 1960.[xxvii]
And it was this sound that he brought to the largely white audience at Newport.
As the “king of the Chicago blues,”[xxviii]
he played primarily for black audiences in Chicago but was branching out to a
larger audience. In 1958, Muddy Waters toured England playing with the Chris
Barber Band. According to one writer, it was Waters’ tour of England that contributed
to the intense British interest in Blues claiming that after the tour,
“countless 10-15-year-olds were listening in the bedrooms to hard-to-come-by
blues records they might have owned or borrowed.”[xxix]
The Blues had a Baby and they called
it Rock and Roll
Muddy Waters’s electrified Delta Blues was a watershed in
modern music in many ways. First, he influenced generations of guitar players.
According to Michael Hill, Muddy Waters “electrified the blues” and his guitar
“launched a thousand bands.” According to Rolling Stone some of the most
accomplished rock guitarists acknowledge Waters’s influence including Jimi
Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmie Page, and Angus Young.[xxx]
Many guitarists also copy his riffs for example compare Waters’s guitar riffs
in “Mannish Boy” to George Thorogood in “Bad to the Bone.” Second, his blues
groups included the elements that would become the modern rock band including
two guitars, bass guitar, drums, and a piano.[xxxi]
Third, many rock and roll musicians were influenced by him. In his song, “The
Blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll,” Waters sang
“All you people, you know
the blues got a soul
Well this is a story, a
story never been told
Well you know the blues got
pregnant
And they named the baby Rock
and Roll.”[xxxii]
In the song,
written in 1977, Muddy Waters acknowledges his and other blues musicians’ role
in shaping rock and roll. Among the significant artists who were shaped by
Waters are the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.[xxxiii]
The Rolling Stones took their band name from a Muddy Waters song[xxxiv]
and Eric Clapton in an interview with NPR acknowledged that he was most
influenced by Muddy Waters. He stated that he would listen to Waters and try to
“emulate the guitar great’s technique.” Clapton and Waters played together. In
fact, Waters’s final live performance was with Clapton in Miami on June 30,
1982.[xxxv]
It goes without saying that Clapton and Rolling Stones’ lead singer Mick Jagger
were included in the young people listening to blues music in England after
Waters’s 1958 tour.
A Long, Lasting, Living Legacy
Muddy Waters’s accomplishments and
influence as a musician have been recognized by many. He was inducted into the
Blues Hall of Fame (1980) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987). He was
nominated by the Recording Academy of the United States for twelve Grammy
Awards and won seven. The seventh was a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992
which is given to performers “who, during their lifetimes, have made creative
contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording.”[xxxvi]
Interestingly, two of the groups that claim significant influence from Muddy
Waters also have been recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the
Recording Academy-- the Rolling Stones in 1986 and Cream (Eric Clapton played guitar for Cream) in
2006.[xxxvii]
Langston Hughes intended for the
blues performance including Muddy Waters Band at Newport to broaden the appeal
of blues music to a broader white audience. The performance at Newport did just
that. More significantly, Waters’s Newport performance serves as a microcosm of
his larger influence on popular culture and music. At Newport, Waters brought
his Chicago blues sound that had previously been performed primarily in front
of black audiences to a largely white audience. His larger influence brought
the Delta blues from Mississippi to the world through the musical artists he
helped shape in rock and roll, jazz, R&B, country and western, and hip hop.[xxxviii]
On that gloomy day in Newport in July 1960, Langston Hughes and the Muddy Water
Band asked what was going to happen to the blues. The answer is one they might
not have anticipated. The blues would transform popular music and Muddy
Waters’s music would be an influential part of that transformation.
Post-Script
Waters’s legacy continues. In October 2023, the Rolling
Stones released, Hackney’s Diamonds, their first studio album since 2005.
One of the songs is a cover of Muddy Waters’s song “Rolling Stones Blues.”[xxxix]
The Rolling Stones once commented that they wanted to play the music that
encouraged their listeners to become Muddy Waters fans. Joe Taysom described
the Rolling Stones as a “gateway band” that encourages people to seek out the
blues. With their cover of Muddy Waters’s “Rolling Stones Blues,” the band
continues to honor Waters’s legacy and influence on their careers and encourage
their listeners to become Muddy Waters and blues fans.
[iii]
Jack Tracy, Original liner notes from the album Muddy Waters at Newport 1960,
(Waxtime Records, 2013).
[iv]
Jack Tracy, Original liner notes from the album Muddy Waters at Newport 1960.
[v] Rick
Massimo, I Got Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival. Middletown,
Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 2017, p. 27.
[xi] Jack
Tracy, Original liner notes from the album Muddy Waters at Newport 1960.
[xii]
Gary Blailock, Liner notes, Muddy Waters at Newport, 1960, (Waxtime
Records, September 2013).
[xv] Born
McKinley Morganfield as cited by Karl Rohr, “Muddy Waters.”
[xvi]
Karl Rohr, “Muddy Waters.”
[xxi] The
Complete Plantation Recordings Muddy Waters, 1941- 1942, Chess/ MCA, 1993.
[xxii]
“Country Blues” and “Interview #1” from The Complete Plantation Recordings
Muddy Waters, 1941- 1942, Chess/ MCA, 1993.
[xxiv]
Michael Hill. “Muddy Waters Hall of Fame Essay.”
[xxvi]
Michael Hill, 1987, “Muddy Waters Hall of Fame Essay.”
[xxvii]
David Whiteis, n.d. “Blues Breakthrough at Newport.”
[xxxi]
Michael Hill, “Muddy Waters Hall of Fame Essay.”
[xxxiii]
Michael Hill, “Muddy Waters Hall of Fame Essay.”
[xxxv]
Robert Palmer, “Muddy Waters: 1915- 1983: An obituary of the blues legend, with
memories from Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards and more,” Rolling
Stone, June 23, 1983.
[xxxvii]
Recording Academy Grammy Awards.
