Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters

Author: Gordon, Robert

Brand: Back Bay Books

Edition: Reprint

Binding: Paperback

Number Of Pages: 448

Release Date: 01-06-2003

Part Number: 9780316164948

Details: Product Description Muddy Waters invented electric blues and created the template for the rock and roll band and its wild lifestyle. Gordon excavates Muddy's mysterious past and early career, taking us from Mississippi fields to postwar Chicago street corners. Review "A brisk account of Waters's journey from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the clubs of Chicago and beyond.... With this entertaining and important book, Robert Gordon has made sure that future generations will never forget the original rolling stone." "Likely to be the definitive treatment of perhaps the genre's definitive artist, a work of musical biography and history that should have the same durability and relevance that Peter Guralnick's treatments of Elvis Presley have had." "Men don't come more masculine than Muddy Waters.... Gordon, whose crisp writting, acute insights, and obvious passion for the music fuels his work, has written a book as large as that man." "Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be given to any biography is that on its pages, you feel like you meet the subject.... I leave CAN'T BE SATISFIED feeling like I can smell, touch, and, most important, hear Muddy Waters again." About the Author Robert Gordon is the author of several highly successful books, including It Came from Memphis and The King on the Road. He produced the Al Green boxed set Anthology, for which his liner notes were nominated for a Grammy Award in 1998. He lives in Memphis with his wife and two children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Can't Be Satisfied By Robert Gordon Back Bay Books Copyright © 2002 Robert GordonAll right reserved. ISBN: 0-316-16494-1 Chapter One MANNISH BOY 1913-1925 Muddy Waters usually told people he was born in Rolling Fork,Mississippi. That's in Sharkey County, the lower quarter of theMississippi Delta. Rolling Fork was where the train stopped, whereMuddy's family would get their mail and do their shopping. RollingFork was on the map. But Muddy's actual birthplace is to the westand north of there, in the next county over-Issaquena, pronounced"Essaquena," the initial "e" the only thing soft in this hard land. Berta Grant, Muddy's mother, lived next to the CottonwoodPlantation, at a bend in the road known as Jug's Corner. It was atiny settlement in the shadow of the Mississippi's levee, a clusterof shacks and cabins undistinguished from most others in theMississippi Delta. Among locals, however, Jug's Corner was wellknown: they had the fish fries on Saturday nights. At Jug's Corner, and throughout the Delta, farmhands partied on theweekend because they'd survived another week, because the landdidn't swallow them, the river didn't drink them, the boss mandidn't kill them, and the mud, a half step from the dust and ashesfrom whence they came, did not engulf them. Muddy's father, Ollie Morganfield, used to attend those Jug's Cornerfrolics. Ollie was from the Magnolia Plantation on Steele Bayou, twomiles between Jug's Corner and Rolling Fork. Big boned and handsome,he could entertain with a guitar. "Ollie could play good blues,"said one long-lived resident of Issaquena County. "He'd go around,folks would get him to play at a party. Dark, tall, real friendly.Full faced. Sing? He used to holler. Played old-timey blues." "I've heard them say that a party didn't brighten up until Ollieappeared," recalled his son Robert Morganfield, Muddy's halfbrother. "He would sing, blow a jug, play guitar, beat a washboard."Ollie was five-feet, eight-inches tall, with brown eyes and blackhair. Born October 20, 1890, he was twenty-one the summer of 1912,already the father of one child though separated from his wife. Berta-probably Alberta or Roberta, but called Berta by everyone-lived with her younger brother Joe and their mother, Della Grant.Berta was a young girl the summer she conceived her only child.There is no record of Berta's birth or death, no one left alive whoknew her. If she was counted in any census, she ha

EAN: 9780316164948

Package Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.0 x 1.3 inches

Languages: English