Muddy Waters (Chicago)

One of my favourite moments of the last year took place just before Christmas. My mate Stu let me play a few records at one of his Club Nitty Gritty nights. He always plays a load of great soul, country and 60s pop records, but among the pile of indie landfill vinyl I took along with me that night was Muddy Waters’ “Hard Again” from 1977.

I put on “The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock N Roll” from the LP and within a minute a guy came up asking what it was, saying how great it was: “it’s fucking amazing, man!”. He was already a few drinks down but he was right: it is amazing. And it was a great feeling watching him immediately try to download it, and maybe – later on – get the whole record.

Keith Richards calls Muddy Waters ‘The King of the Blues’ and it’s a fitting title. Check out footage of him on YouTube or the recently released ‘Live at The Checkerboard’: in all of it, he’s regal. He dominates the stage, undoubtedly the boss, the chief. Watch his performance on ‘The Last Waltz’; Scorsese daren’t take the camera off him.

Then there’s the music. He was a singer, guitarist and composer and led a band that at various times had Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Buddy Guy and Otis Spann in it. He basically invented electric blues. Before he pitched up in Chicago from Mississippi in the early 40s, his kind of music was all acoustic, and in club gigs guitars could barely be heard over the noise of the streets outside. So he plugged into an amplifier: the sound of the blues – and Rock N Roll – was changed forever. The Rolling Stones named themselves after one of his songs, Led Zeppelin ‘borrowed’ a few of them, and Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” emerged from his “Catfish Blues” which he played live in the late 60s.

He died in 1983 and is buried in Restvale Cemetery in a place called Alsip, to the south of Chicago. My mate Dan drove me there this morning (through – it must be said, some pretty grim parts of the city: many areas just seem neglected, almost ghostly during the day). We arrived just as a thunder storm was starting. His gravestone was easy to find, with his real name “McKinley Morganfield”, a guitar and the line ‘The Mojo Is Gone’ enough to identify him.

For someone so important (to American music, and the history of modern Chicago at least) it seemed not just understated but a bit underwhelming.

And that’s true of Chicago more generally. Trying to find any memorial to the guy here is nigh-on impossible: his former home on Lake Park Avenue is apparently vacant and dilapidated. The clubs where he played are mostly gone, with the famous 47th Street mostly flattened. Later today, we are going to the home of Chess Records where there are bits and pieces of Chicago Blues memorabilia but nothing befitting its vital (yeah, that important) contribution to western popular culture.

It’s galling in another way too.

Dan was telling me on the way down to the cemetery that plans to host George Lucas’s £750m ‘Narrative Arts Museum’ in Chicago had in the last month been canned. The city and its Mayor had been bending over backwards to accommodate Lucas on a waterfront site, but the plans ran into planning problems and resident groups’ objections.

I love most of Lucas’s work and I don’t care about his museum being in Chicago, where he has no real connection. But surely the city could put just some of that effort into making a Blues Museum happen, and honour folk who actually lived and contributed to the place? It’s long overdue.

Dan and I played loads of Muddy’s tunes in the car today. I laughed at ‘Hoochie Coochie Man‘, when he sings: “You know I’m here/Everybody knows I’m here”. It seems like that isn’t the case in his own adopted home.