Rolling Out The Red Carpet In Rolling Fork

Today Muddy Waters recieved his blues marker in Rolling Fork as the birthplace of McKinley A. Morganfield. Eleanor Barkhorn writes about the big day in yesterday's Delta Democrat:

“We're just so excited to have this tangible evidence of Muddy Waters here in Rolling Fork,” said Meg Cooper, coordinator for the Mississippi Lower Delta Partnership, who spearheaded efforts to bring the blues marker to Rolling Fork.

Cooper said international tourists flock to Rolling Fork, searching for signs of Waters, who was born McKinley Morganfield in 1913 and lived in the Delta until the 1940s, before moving to Chicago.

That's fine, except, Muddy was not born in Rolling Fork.

Muddy Waters biographer Robert Gordon was on hand for the ceremony, so nobody's trying to fool tourists. Because the first page in Gordon's biography of Muddy details where Muddy was born and why so many wrongly believe it to be Rolling Fork. Apparently the marker will explain that while Muddy often said he was born in Rolling Fork, he actually was born in neighboring Issaquena County at a place called Jug's Corner and Rolling Fork was the nearest post office. Here's an excerpt of an interview with Muddy's brother Robert Morganfield for Robert Gordon's 2002 documentary "Can't Be Satisfied", a companion to the biography of the same name.
If you really want to see where Muddy Waters was born, Click here to see unused video and interviews from Robert Gordon's American Masters documentary on Muddy Waters.

And if you really want to find out how it really wasn't Alan Lomax who "discovered" Muddy Waters, then read Gordon's bio. Here's what music writer and historian Dave Marsh had to say about it following Lomax's death in 2002:

Lomax's obit made the front page mainly because he "discovered" Son House and Muddy Waters. But in Can't Be Satisfied, his new Muddy Waters biography, Robert Gordon shows that Lomax's discoveries weren't the serendipitous events the great white hunter portrayed. Lomax was led to House and then Waters by the great Negro scholar, John Work III of Fisk University. Gordon even shows Lomax plagiarizing Work, and not on a minor point. (See page 51) In his book, Lomax offers precisely one sentence about Work. He eliminated Work from his second Mississippi trip. He also burned Muddy Waters for the $20 he promised for making the records.

Click here to read the full Marsh article.

Yes, they rolled out the red carpet today for Muddy Waters in Rolling Fork. Hopefully, it's a really long carpet that stretches all the way to Jug's Corner. Like the $20 Lomax never paid him, Muddy deserves it, and so much more.

Click to see the PBS American Masters Muddy Waters page.

Click here to hear a young Muddy sing "Country Blues" as recorded by Alan Lomax on the Stovall Plantation.

John Work: A folklorist's window into 1940s black music

From the International Herald Tribune:

Two years ago, the book "Lost Delta Found" criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of "Recording Black Culture," an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.

Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on "Recording Black Culture," instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll.

Robert Gordon, who edited "Lost Delta Found" with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Work's recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called "I Am His, He Is Mine" as an example.

"There's nascent boogie-woogie in that music," said Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Work and Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Mississippi, in 1941. "That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock 'n' roll."

The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing "If I Had My Way" offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Work's recording of the Fairfield Four's "Walk Around in Dry Bones" presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.

[Read The Entire Article Here]