The Real Folk Blues/More Real Folk Blues

Excerpted from the liner notes to the 2002 MCA compilation of the 1965 Chess release "The Real Folk Blues" (tracks recorded 1947-1964) and the 1967 Chess release "More Real Folk Blues" (tracks recorded Jun 1950-Dec 1953)---

"Muddy Waters disembarked from a train in May, 1943, he had no plans to revolutionize the thriving blues scene in his new hometown, Chicago. At best, he hoped to become a competitive player in a field still dominated by men who made similar south-to-midwest journeys around the time of World War I, Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy. Aside from a cousin and a few friends, Muddy's arrival in Chicago was scarcely noted. But by the time of his departure nearly forty years later, the impact of Muddy's arrival was global. Nine years after his 1983 death, a Lifetime Achievement Grammy hailed Muddy as "the greatest force to come from the post World War II electric blues era. He defined the Chicago blues sound..." That forceful definition was echoed by legions of Windy City blues bands as well as blues-inspired rockers here and abroad, foremost in the fleet a band which took its name from one of Muddy's songs, the Rolling Stones. Yet for all the inspired emulation which as made Muddy Waters' music a wellspring for rivers of pop, rock and blues over the past half century, there's still nothing like returning to the source.

Muddy's birthplace flows right along with our river metaphor--a south Mississippi Delta plantation settlement named Rolling Fork. Born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1915, Muddy was reportedly given his name by a grandmother for this childhood love of playing in the muck which imbued him with the earthiest of blues monikers. He was the right age to be influenced by the early blues recordings, and he was in the right place to learn directly from such Delta dynamos as Eddie "Son" House, affectionately called "the old man" by Muddy. By the time folklorists Alan Lomax and John Work recorded Muddy (at House's suggestion) in 1941, he was a regionally popular performer hankering to shuck his sharecroppers overalls for full-time music making far from the plantation culture. Being recorded by the Library of Congress was the nudge he needed to buy that train ticket north.

The unlikely ease with which Muddy first recorded would not be repeated in Chicago. His 1946 sessions for 20th Century and Columbia went nowhere, ad he first appeared on the Chess brothers' Aristocrat label in 1947 as a sideman to pianist-singer Sunnyland Slim. Five years passed between Muddy's arrival in Chicago and his first hit, 1948's "I Can't Be Satisfied". The launch had been slow in coming, but the liftoff emboldened Muddy to assert himself as the consummate blues-singing bandleader. His early ‘50's sidemen included harmonica wizard Little Walter Jacobs, pianist Otis Spann, and guitarist Jimmy Rogers. They, among other, contributed to the sound which made Muddy's best Aristocrat and Chess label recordings genre-defining statements. Through the first half of the Fifties anyway, Muddy ruled.

A decade later, the world was no longer his. Muddy's last rhythm & blues chart hits had come in 1958, and the Chess label was soon seeking any possible means to keep the artist who delivered the label's first hits viable in the Sixties. If the blues audience was waning, might the folk audience embrace Muddy? In 1964, chess released an acoustic album entitled "Muddy Waters, Folk Singer". Two years later, Chess collected a dozen of Muddy's singles for the 1966 LP, "The Real Folk Blues" the songs ranged from Muddy's first Aristocrat label release as a frontman, "Gypsy Woman", rerecorded in 1947, to a fairly recent single, 1964's "The Same Things". The opening sounds are Muddy hollering "Woh yeah" to the shimmering counterpoint of Jimmy Rogers' tremolo guitar on "Mannish Boy". With Muddy in his vein-popping preacher’s voice and an enthusiastic gaggle of sisters cheering each shouted self-affirmation, this performance suggests a netherworld between church and barrelhouse, one where the supernaturally potent singer proclaims his priesthood in a ghetto fertility cult.

Other performances reflect the manner in which Muddy reworked music from his Mississippi youth: 1950's "Walkin' Blues" is an archetypal Delta blues which both Robert Johnson and Muddy learned from Son House; "Rollin' & Tumblin'" is yet another Delta standard first recorded in 1929 by Hambone Willie Newbern; "Canary Bird" reworks John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson's 1937 hit, "Blue Bird Blues”. Even 1958's "Walking Thru the Park" issues a warning against Muddy's well-armed girlfriend drawn from 'the real folk blues' vocabulary: Mississippi John Hurt issued the same warning in his 1928 Okeh recording, "Ain't No Tellin'".

"The Real Folk Blues" album was an eclectic overview: Half its tracks come from Muddy's earliest (and arguably, 'folkiest') Aristocrat and Chess sessions, while the other half drew from a variety of later, more demonstrably urban (and at times, even urbane) material. The collection evidentially hit its target market, for a year after its release the sequel appeared, 1967's "More Real Folk Blues". The first 'folk blues' album had spanned fourteen years of Muddy's music, the second offered a dozen songs from a more focused period, 1948-1952. It was more tightly cohesive for that, spotlighting the evolution of Muddy's music from the guitars-vocals-bass formula of his first triumphs to the influential and adventurous band sound which emerged in the early Fifties. Four 1948 songs, among them a reworking of Robert Johnson's "King Hearted Woman", are simply Muddy, his singling slide guitar, and bassist Ernest "Big' Crawford. It was a sublime yet simple combo, Crawford's bass pushing the beat lazily but insistently along in the manner of the heavy right thumb of one of Muddy's mentors, singer-guitarist Big Bill Broonzy. But even in his most apparently 'trad' phase, Muddy took imaginative and innovative liberties: “Down South Blues” cobbles lyrical elements of Sonny Boy Williamson’s 1938’s “Down South” onto a more exciting musical framework which is essentially “Rollin’ & Tumblin’”. Sonny Boy’s imprint may also be heard in the early unamplified harmonica performances of Little Walter Jacobs, who comes into his own with his more hard-edged, amp-ed up sound in “She’s Alright”, yet another “Rollin’ & Tumblin’” variant. The beautifully low-key “Honey Bee” is abuzz with the effortless interplay of the guitars of Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, musicians whose insightful exchanges have often been described as telepathic.

Muddy’s two ‘real folk blues’ albums were revisionist history of sort, attempts to provide a fresh framework for this music, especially his earliest Aristocrat and Chess label recordings. By the time the second collection appeared in 1967, Muddy and his band were making forays into such hip niteries as the Electric Circus and the Fillmore. Yet even as Muddy’s audience changed, he continued to bring them many of the songs first collected on LP under the ‘real folk blues’ rubric. While this may have been because he saw them as folk songs and thus suitable for young white listeners, it was more likely because they were core parts of his repertoire, major elements of a music gazing with one eye back at the Delta and with the other toward a future which Muddy lived to enjoy but could scarcely have imagined when these recordings were freshly minted."
– Mark A. Humphrey