Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied (2005)
Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, directors.
American Masters Series. (www.pbs.org)
54 min.
Any person remotely interested in studying the history of grassroots American
music will inevitably end up listening to the blues, and when listening to the blues, that
individual will at some point end up listening to Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters: Can’t
Be Satisfied allows the viewer to enter the world of this seminal figure in American
music. The film is a companion to co-director Robert Gordon’s authoritative biography
Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (2003).
A wide variety of important figures from the musical world testify throughout the
film to the importance, influence, and undeniable power of Muddy Waters and his music.
B.B. King, another critically important figure in blues history, calls Waters the “godfather
of the blues”, and states that “Muddy was singing when I was still plowin’.” Keith
Richard of the Rolling Stones muses that “there’s a dead place in us all” that Waters’
music represents, while Bonnie Raitt, testifies that Waters was, without a doubt, “the
most sexy bluesman ever.” On a personal level, however, this musical icon led a
difficult, complex life – several ex-band members discuss Waters’ preferences for young
women, while his granddaughter recalls the difficult relationship that Waters had with his
wife, concluding that he was “as much of a family man as he could be.”
Students of the blues will probably already be familiar with much of the story of
Waters’ life described in this film, but for those unfamiliar with the bluesman’s story, the
film supplies ample background material, from his early years in the Mississippi delta,
playing music on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale, to his discovery by Library of
Congress archivist and folklorist, Alan Lomax, in 1941. Lomax went on to make the first
recordings of Waters’ music (those “plantation recordings” are still essential recordings
for anyone interested in the blues).
In 1943 Muddy Waters joined the legions of southern blacks that migrated to the
north in the pre-war and World War II era. Waters ended up in Chicago, where he got a
job in a paper factory, and began to play his music at house parties and small clubs.
Waters and others transformed the acoustic blues they had played in the south into a more
electrified, up-tempo brand of blues, and eventually, Waters’ music became the
personification of the new “urban blues”. In 1950, Leonard Chess, an immigrant from
Poland, founded Chess Records. One of the first artists Chess signed was Muddy Waters.
During his years with Chess, Waters grew to become the most influential blues figure in
Chicago, and beyond, introducing young music fans from all over the world to Chicago
blues. Many, like the young Keith Richard, Bill Wyman, and Mick Jagger, came to
revere Waters and through him, other American bluesmen. His legacy continued, as
many of the first songs performed by the Rolling Stones were Muddy Waters covers.
Waters also played a role in introducing the blues to a wider white audience in America
when he performed in 1960 at Newport. But at the same time, the film complicates
Waters’ relationship with Chess and other paternalistic whites who have played a role in
his life – musician Jim Dickinson relates that, in Waters’ mind, Chess, Lomax, and the
plantation owner at Stovall were essentially all the same “white devil.”
As the film continues through its historical trajectory, blues historian Ron Wynn
notes that the rock ‘n roll and the social changes of the 1960s were the worst things that
could have happened to the blues and to Muddy Waters. Several classic blues clubs in
Chicago turned to rock-and-roll, and many African-Americans felt that the blues was a
musical reminder of a regrettable past that would be better off forgotten. Blues audiences
in the 1960s became increasingly whiter and more mainstream, but this popular
recognition led to a significant blues revival in the 1970s that reinvigorated Waters’
career, allowing him to release a string of popular albums before his death in 1983. Right
up to that moment, Waters work held the respect of many in the music world. Bonnie
Raitt notes in the film that even in his very last concerts “he is packin’…in his spirit.”
Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied thus presents a very historically satisfying
account of one of the most important figures in post-war American music. What is
missing, unfortunately, is a significant treatment of the cultural and social contexts of
Waters’ life, and any real accounting of the social changes taking place in America that
Waters or others around him experienced. Why were black attitudes towards the blues
changing so radically in the 1960s? What were Waters’ experiences with racism during
any of the multitude of concert tours in which he took part in from the 1950s till the end
of his life? What did Waters think of the changes that were taking place in the black
community during the years of his musical popularity? None of these questions are
addressed in any significant manner in this film. Nevertheless, the film does give the
viewer a good idea of what all the excitement is about when a music fan discovers
Muddy Waters for the very first time.
Stephen Armstrong
Central CT State University
Steph17895@aol.com