Can’t
Be Satisfied: The Life & Times of Muddy Waters
by Robert Gordon
320 Pages
Memphis
musicologist Robert Gordon undertook the gargantuan task of
recreating a legend that would belittle even the most researched and
most knowledgeable. How can one simply recreate a man who
single-handedly brought the world the electric blues and defined
Chicago blues in the fifties? In all honesty, you really can’t.
Gordon, however, realistically does put the argument to the test and
has raised the bar for any biographies of blues legends to come
after it.
Spending years of
gleaning information from interviews, reviews, and music history and
then taking on the task of gathering information from his
contemporaries and family; Gordon adds a human element to the blues
legend that had never hitherto been captured. Reading like a
narrative textbook with citation after citation and quote after
quote, the reader may be encumbered and stumble along the way as far
as readability is concerned. However, Gordon does well to depict a
strong motif that was a reality in the blues world, a man and
musician who leads a dual life. Gordon, through the eyes of both
close friend and family (illegitimate or otherwise), does well to
show McKinely Morganfield the hard worker and the provider and Muddy
Waters the partying adulterer. Gordon also does well to depict the
master-worker Waters translated from the Stovall Plantation to the
studios of Chess Records. The biography subsequently upset the Chess
Family, but Gordon minces no words when it comes to Waters’
recording career.
The Notes section
at the back of the book gives a very good scope of the Waters
discography and recommended listening. It also provides the
subsequent list of resources Gordon put to use and provides a
definitive “To-Read” list for any would-be blues historian. There
are also some fine pictures located in the middle of the book that
shed some light on both the origins and puts the infamous name with
a face.
Gordon only falls
short, in what a grammar school teacher would say is the breadth of
the subject. He does well in what he covers, but there are some
obvious parts missing and skewed, maybe sugar-coated a little too
much. Yet, giving Gordon the benefit of the doubt, the book is an
extravagant introduction for those who don’t know the blues world or
Muddy Waters well. By placing Waters in his place and time
throughout the book, Gordon helps those who were around when he was
alive to remember the place and time and the impact he had on the
world of music. For those of us who didn’t have the privilege of
being around when Waters was still the living myth, it opens the
eyes and ears when one of his iconic songs comes on our CD player or
one of his protégés strike into a cover or lifts a riff here and
there. And for those who don’t know the blues at all, this would be
the perfect cultural, musicological, and anthropological place to
start.
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