A quarter-of-a-century ago, during the summer of 1997 when Davey Johnson managed the Orioles to the American League East pennant, I went on the road with David Simon to research a bio-pic of Muddy Waters.
In February of 1978, as a kid on the staff of the City Paper, I interviewed Muddy at the Marble Bar, just before it became the punk palace of Baltimore. Innocently, I asked the great man where the blues came from.
It was as though he had a deep pocket of stock answers for white boys like me who first heard the music of Mississippi across the sonic boom of Led Zeppelin.
“Well son,” he said, a glass of champagne in hand. “I guess they come from the days when you had to turn the kettle up high and sing down low.”
Five years later, at age 68, Muddy passed away. By then, I was a cops and obit reporter at The Sun and persuaded the features editor to send me to the southside of Chicago to cover the funeral.
Along with a newsroom friendship with Simon based on a love of American music, my blues cred got me the Hollywood gig. From Chicago to Los Angeles to New Orleans, we interviewed every musician we could find who had known Muddy. And then headed for Rolling Fork, Mississippi where – on April 4, 1915 – McKinley Morganfield was born nearby in a community called Jug’s Corner.
In 1997, the “Mississippi Blues Trail” was not yet established and would not be for another decade. A series of handsome historical markers designate every important person from Charley Patton in Bolton to the Staples Singers in Drew who was either born, performed or died in the Delta.
[A note on the Staples Singers: During Muddy’s funeral at the Metropolitan Funeral Parlor, Roebuck “Pops” Staples (1914-2000) stood behind the open casket on the altar, alone with his guitar, and sang “Glory, glory, hallelujah…” I doubt I will ever see anything like it again.]
In Rolling Fork, Simon and I could find nothing indicating that Muddy Waters had ever visited, much less came into the world there. So we called on the experts, the kind easily found in the smallest of American towns: the local librarian.
I forget the kind and helpful woman’s name but I’ll never forget her embarrassment. “See that gazebo out there,” she said, pointing to the lawn of the lone library in Sharkey-Issaquena County. “That’s it,” in regard to honoring Muddy Waters.
If no one was around to point it out, you’d take it for just another store-bought gazebo. Simon and I sat down beneath it for a moment and moved on.
The script, commissioned by Oprah Winfrey’s production company, was never written, much less produced. In 2008, Sony Pictures released Cadillac Blues starring Jeffrey Wright as Muddy. It lost money.
My “big idea” of how to open the movie came to me when we visited the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale and saw the remains of the cabin Muddy lived in when he drove a tractor on the Stovall cotton plantation.
In 1941, on the porch of this cabin near the rivertown of Friar’s Point, Alan Lomax recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress. The guitarist’s music and its countless siblings have long been heard, played and loved around the world. I saw it for myself at a gig on my birthday in the Koenji neighborhood of Tokyo when South Korean guitarist Mok Kyung Kim ripped into “Shake Your Money Maker” by slide guitarist Elmore James (1918-1963) of Richland, Mississippi.
My idea was surreal, as much Wizard of Oz as Alice in Wonderland: What if a tornado – “It’s a twister, it’s twister!” shouted Bert Lahr as a Kansas farmhand in the film – picked up Muddy’s cabin and dropped it in all the places around the globe where his music has put down roots as deep as a Magnolia tree?
I’m not sure precisely what Simon replied, only that – to put it mildly – he gave it no consideration.
Alright, are you still with me? Fast forward 26 years to the Rolling Fork of the first week of May. I was there to cover damage from a tornado that ripped through the town in late March, a devastating act of Mother Nature that left at least 26 dead and flattened the town of about 1,800 people. Silver City, about 30 miles to the northeast, also suffered serious damage.
“We went to church Thursday night [March 23] and by the time we were getting ready for bed it had started to rain pretty hard. The lights flickered and then they went out,” said JoAnn Morganfield Williams, 69, daughter of Muddy’s deceased half-brother, Robert Morganfield, for whom the street where she lives is named.
“The next morning we took a walk and all we could say was, ‘Thank you Lord for saving us.’”
Mrs. Williams is married to a local minister, the Rev. Ezell Williams and they spoke to me from the yard of their home across the street from the Walker Funeral Home, which handled many of the dead. The business is owned by Rolling Fork mayor Eldridge J. Walker.
“That tornado was a death angel,” said Rev. Williams. “It tore up everything. I woke up the next morning crying.”
A two-minute walk from the Williams home is the site of the Muddy Waters Blues Trail marker – erected in 2007 – at 130 Walnut Street. Or was. The tornado, with winds up to 195 miles per hour – sheared it clean from the base. The cast aluminum sign weighing 200 pounds has never been found.
Perhaps, as Robert Johnson once sang, it landed off “in Ethiopia somewhere…”
Rafael Alvarez is at work on a biography of the New York City bluesman Robert Ross, who accompanied him to Rolling Fork this past May. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
I would also check the Stovall Plantation…. in Coahoma County, just off of Route 1.