Muddy's Chess Move - Page 2

Leonard reportedly couldn't understand what Waters was singing in the studio, but he understood the sales and somehow grasped that the records sold because, not in spite, of the track's rawness.

This insight was of such importance that American Heritage magazine (December 1994) selected the Chess brothers as among the 10 most important agents of change in America since 1950 with the following comment:

"The Chess brothers made records that helped transport African-American culture, especially its language and music, to its central place in American culture...The Chess brothers' story is one in which greed and inspiration swirled together in a characteristically American pot where the ingredients did not so much melt as alloy in a metallurgical sense: steel guitar, electricity, and vinyl transmuted into a wholly new cultural substance."

Waters came to Chicago from the famous Mississippi Delta - the birthplace of the blues - which stretches from Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, to Memphis, Tennessee in the north, and from central Mississippi in the east, to the Ozark Plateau of Arkansas in the west.

Though largely uninhabited until the 1840's, the Delta proved to be fertile ground (due to regular flooding, much like the Nile) and cotton plantations boomed throughout the region. After the Civil War many former slaves remained tied to the land in the South through the sharecropping farming system, whereby the farmer pledged large shares of his future crops to the landowner in exchange for use of land, seed, tools, clothing and the like. This system remained very powerful at least until WW1, and often the farmer was unable to get out from under the crushing debt accumulated under it.

Often, the only way out of debt and into possibly better conditions was to move, which many black families did often: thus the themes of suffering, oppression, and the road-as-salvation were the themes of many blues songs. The blues, like gospel, derived from a blending of African rhythms and tonalities with European songs structures, and evolved out of work songs and field hollers.

The Delta was also home to the notorious levee camps, another oppressive system where mostly black workers were hired to build and maintain the levees that kept the Mississippi River in check, and were often abused, underpaid, and overcharged for necessities. Many Delta blues musicians first performed professionally for Saturday night dances at the camps.

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