GORJUS on the record collection of Muddy Water

In late July of 1942, a couple of researchers traveled down to the Stovall Plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi. They were looking for a guitarist people called “Muddy Water”—just like that, in the singular. He lived just a little bit past this old store:

(Well of course it didn’t look like that in 1942. This is what it looks like now. You’re going to have to use your imagination a little, so keep up).

Robert Gordon’s lovingly told and richly detailed Can’t Be Satisfied tells the story of what happened next. One of the researchers had a recording machine, and told the man still called Muddy Water that he had heard Robert Johnson had died—but that Muddy Water was just as good. So they cut an acetate of this song, sitting just a little while down the road from where that picture right up there was taken:

Years later, the guitarist remembered that summer day:

When he played back the first song, I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. I thought, ‘Man, I can sing.’ Later on . . . I carried that record up the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’

And in the house the guitarist lived in on the Stovall Plantation, he had a collection of seven records. Two were by Arthur Crudup, a great Peetie Wheatstraw side, Tony Hollins, and of course Sonny Boy Williamson, plus a big band type situation from Jay McShann and some revved-up gospel by Elder Oscar Saunders. If you’ve got Spotify, you can listen to all 42 minutes of it.

While Muddy Water (still no s—that comes later, even on his first record on Aristocrat, he was still just the Water) loved his music, he didn’t have any of Robert Johnson’s records at the house that day. But he had taught himself how to play so much like his hero—who he said he had never met, but seen once on the street, in Friar’s Point.

I drove up Highway 1 to Stovall the other day, wondering if I could feel Muddy Waters; stood right downtown Friar’s Point and squinted, trying to see people mobbed around Robert Johnson in adoration; even went to West Helena to strain to hear the echoes of King Biscuit. But that was all a long time ago, a very long time—long gone before I was born. In all of those places I stood by myself, sweating in the late summer heat, sighing at that Delta forever horizon.

WHAT I WAS REALLY LOOKING FOR is a connection to those lost times, the legendary creators of the heart of American music. The brilliant recordings will endure even as there are less and less people who had a direct connection to those times. The rare times I do hear about those direct links it’s like a thunderbolt.

A couple of years ago I was a guest on the radio show of Mayor Charles Evers, who recently passed. The booth at WMPR 90.1 was decorated with photos of the great hero Medgar Evers, the mayor’s beloved brother. The hallway was covered with photos of him with other folks—in a motorcade with Senator Robert Kennedy, in front of Air Force One with President Trump—but the booth was all about Medgar.

Plus B.B. King. Mayor Evers and B.B. were longtime buddies, and the death of the icon struck Mayor Evers hard.

So right as we are about to hit a lull in the conversation, I go for it—after my whole life wanting to know more about these great heroes—and I ask, very much like a little kid—Mayor. What’s—what’s the best show you ever saw? Like, musical show?

And he said Best? Boy, I have seen a lot of shows.

I press just a little more gently—okay. Well what was a real good one then, a special one?

In that deep burbling rumble of a voice, he began—There was this one time, I was in Paris with B.B., on tour with Muddy Waters . . .

Mayor Evers went on for a little bit more than that; maybe I will tell you about the rest of that, one day. I believe I was closer to the real electricity of the blues that day in a radio booth in Jackson than when standing ankle deep in ice cream soil up in Coahoma County.

In the end I am just trying to find the connection to these beautiful things I love so much. I fail an awful lot in trying to do it. Like—like did you know that one day in 1980 B.B. King pressed his hands and shoes into wet concrete on the corner of Church and Second in Indianola, and signed his name “RILEY B.B. KING”? Because I did not know that until recently, even though I feel like that is definitely something I should have known.

It is still there, but I’ll be danged if I can get a good Polaroid of it. Here’s the best of those I’ve made, you can kind of see a B and a K and a G:

I mean, wow. That is a bad photograph. At least I got . . . all of the weeds growing in the sidewalk in the frame, even though I’ve managed to get them out of focus. Just a real achievement here.

But the point being: there is magic out there, but you have to seek it out, and it’s not always going to be where you think it is.

Your mission this week in honor of Muddy’s record collection is dive into your own. What he was listening to surprisd me, but that’s what he had close at hand. Think of your favorite college band who you haven’t listened to in forever, then dig into their discography and time travel. Grace Hale’s deep dive on Athens, Cool Town, has gotten me thinking so much about college “bohemia” and the DIY ethic, so in that spirit, go get your ears melted by The Grumpies.

AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my (less awful) Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.