Muddy Waters was born in Mississippi and shaped his ”Chicago blues”
sound in Illinois` Windy City, but three rock and rollers from Texas are spearheading a campaign to raise $1 million for a museum in memory of the late Chicago bluesman and his musical legacy.
Growing up in Texas, ZZ Top members Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard nurtured their love for the blues via late-night radio shows, where they first heard the music of Waters and his contemporaries. When the three later joined forces as ZZ Top at the end of the 1960s, there was little doubt that the blues-especially the music of Waters-would play an important part in the trio`s boogie rock sound.
”The first day that the three of us convened for a jam session, Frank and I had already worked together a little bit, playing the blues,” recalls Top guitarist Gibbons. ”But I didn`t know Dusty, and when Frank invited him to join us, I was curious about what we would play together. Dusty walked in and said, `Set your watch. Blues. Key of C.” Gibbons laughs.
”It turned out that all of us especially admired Muddy Waters, and there were direct links to his stuff in our music right from the beginning-in the song, `Long Distance Boogie,` for instance. Right from the start, there was that kind of bluesiness as a major part of our sound.” Later, after ZZ Top had established itself as a top rock act and was selling out stadiums across the country, the trio invited Waters to appear with them as a special guest on a number of shows before his death in 1983.
Gibbons, Beard and Hill, of course, weren`t the only ones to fall under the spell of Waters` electrified, urbanized Delta Blues, which would later come to personify the gutsy ”Chicago blues” sound. While Waters, who moved to Chicago in the 1940s, and most other bluesmen never made the pop charts or achieved mass success, their music influenced countless young seminal rock musicians of the 1960s who loved the blues, borrowed from them, and achieved mainstream success with their modern bluesrock interpretations of the style.
One of the most obvious bands to draw inspiration early on from records by Waters (and his contemporaries, including another Chicago blues great, Willie Dixon) was the Rolling Stones. Meanwhile, guitarist Eric Clapton has traced his early interest in blues to two albums-one by Howlin` Wolf, the other a Chess Records release, ”The Best of Muddy Waters.”
”So many people in the rock community were introduced to the blues through the English musicians,” notes Gibbons. ”For some reason, they had more of an appreciation of the blues than the Americans did. So many people would hear an English band back in the `60s do a song and think, boy, that`s a great song, and then if they did any research on it at all they found that it was an old song originally done by one of these great blues players.”
Now, American blues and rock fans are being invited to show their appreciation for Waters` musical legacy and the blues in general by contributing to the ”Million Dollar Blues Fund.” Donations may be sent to the Delta Blues Museum/Muddy Waters Memorial Fund, Carnegie Public Library, 114 Delta, Clarksdale, Miss. 38614. Proceeds will be used to establish a permanent Muddy Waters exhibit in the already-existing Delta Blues Museum, located in the Carnegie Public Library in Clarksdale, Miss., near the plantation where Waters (born McKinley Morgenfield in 1915) grew up. Contributions also will be used to expand and upgrade the existing museum, a rather primitive affair that currently occupies a former storeroom on an upper floor of the library.
At the moment, the museum features books, films, videotapes and souvenirs related to the blues of the Mississippi Delta. Eventually, plans call for it to include Muddy Waters memorabilia, including timbers from his childhood home and a special ”Muddy-wood” guitar designed by Gibbons, plus either a replica of a honkytonk roadhouse complete with elevated stage or a downhome-style front porch big enough to stage live blues shows.
ZZ Top`s involvement in the project dates from last summer, when Gibbons stopped off at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksville and was invited by its director, Sid Graves, to take a ride 12 miles up the road to the Stovall Plantation, where Waters was born in a small log cabin on the grounds. Graves had gotten a call from the Stovall family telling him that the cabin had been struck by a tornado and the Mississippi highway department was requesting that it be dismantled for safety reasons.
”While we were there I was invited to reach into the discarded lumber pile beside the cabin and take a cyprus log as a souvenir,” explains Gibbons. ”It was so big, it barely fit into the trunk of the car, and it occurred to me that rather than just having the log lying around in a corner of the house, it could be turned into a guitar.”
A Memphis guitar company agreed to turn Gibbons` souvenir into a playable instrument, and the finished guitar was painted white, with a stylistic rendition of the Mississippi River flowing off the back of the body and wiggling down the center of the neck, ending in a triangular deltoid shape.
”We toyed with painting it blue, but that seemed a bit too corny, and painting the name Muddy Waters on it seemed to be too much detail,” says Gibbons. ”This way, the instrument stands with the river and its power to embody all of the Mississippi Delta.”
Initially, Gibbons planned to play the guitar on stage, but soon changed his mind.
”Not long after visiting Muddy`s cabin, we sent a small donation to the Delta Blues Museum to assist in relocating it as a landmark addition to the museum,” he says. ”Then, while the guitar was being built, we decided that we would rather contribute it to the museum as a kind of focus for the recognition of the importance of the blues as an American art form.” From there, the band decided to go a step further and help museum director Graves and Living Blues magazine founder Jim O`Neal launch the current fund drive.
While Gibbons, Beard and Hill can wax eloquent on Waters as a ”musical and spiritual godfather,” they also have plenty of down-to-earth memories of Muddy.
”I think the memory of Muddy that comes to mind first for me is the first time we actually met him,” recalls drummer Frank Beard. ”We had just done our first single, `Salt Lick.` A concert promoter heard it, thought we were a black band, and invited us to go out on a tour that featured a lot of great blues acts, including Muddy. We showed up before the first concert and found all of the other guys sitting around playing poker-they had a Fender bass case stretched between their knees for a table and every one of them had a big wad of money and a gun in front of them. We stood around for a while and finally one guy we knew, Freddie King, took us over to Muddy and introduced us. He glanced up at us for maybe a millisecond, flashed this huge smile and said `Pleased to meetcha,` and went right back to his poker hand.
”But things progressed from there,” says Beard. ”We ended up doing about six dates together on the tour, and pretty soon we were invited to join in the poker games. Muddy was a good poker player; they all were. They really cleaned our plows. I don`t think we made any money at all on that tour.”
