By Robert Gordon. Foreword by Keith Richards. 408 pages. Little, Brown. 2002.
 
 

By David Cohen    Muddy Waters apparently didn’t appear in a photograph until he was almost 30. The occasion was not his first marriage, nor his second. Instead, he had his picture taken to mark what would become a milestone in U.S. culture – the pressing of his first record in 1942, via Alan Lomax and John Work III, who had sought him out during a field recording expedition in the Mississippi Delta. During that expedition, Lomax, a white man, astounded Waters by drinking out of the same cup of water as he did.     Such were the origins of Waters. From there, gates opened and things changed. By the end of his life in April 1983, Waters was arguably the most important musical figure of the 20th century, a brilliant bluesman who was the key bridge between the passionate but often passive acoustic music of the Deep South and the dynamic but sometimes too polished sound of the urban North. Rock ‘n’ roll was only one of the byproducts. And then, he and pianist Otis Spann took that sound to England and inspired a British Invasion.     Robert Gordon’s biography is first and foremost a musical biography, exploring and discussing his recordings. But Gordon’s book also makes Chicago a major character. While many other blues books have delved into the poverty and racism of the Delta, Gordon also deals extensively with a Chicago that had to live with the seemingly wholesale transfer of parts of the old Confederacy into some of its neighborhoods on the South and West sides. There is no romanticism here – Waters’ world was a place were the worst scourges of poverty transplanted themselves into a Chicago already rife with temptations and ruined the lives of many, including some of his most gifted sidemen. Around Muddy, there was violence, drug abuse, all manners of vice.     Waters himself comes off as generous when it came to his interactions with fellow musicians, naïve when it came to business, and pretty much of a jerk when it came to women and his many illegitimate children. Gordon’s most admires him when Waters was able to avoid the endless compromises sought by some in the music business, and just play. Then, to Gordon, he was without peer.    The book is well-researched and well-written. There is one major annoyance: Gordon has 73 pages of notes at the end, some of which go well beyond footnotes to offer details that he didn’t include in the main narrative. Many of these details are fascinating –anyone remember the Venus Butterfly episode of "L.A. Law"? See, Pages 371-72. – but they could have been part of the main text. Still, this is a most worthwhile book.

David Cohen is a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of "Rugged and Enduring: The Eagles, The Browns and 5 Years of Football."