Delta research yields wealth of details for Muddy Waters biography

A few years ago, Robert Gordon spent time driving through the Mississippi Delta, looking for information he knew he might not find. There was no guidebook or map available, nobody specific to look up in a phone book.

"I was looking for information about a culture about which records were not kept," Gordon says.

Yet his quest was not so Quixotic. Gordon was looking for memories of one of the Delta's legendary sons, so his approach was simple: Whenever he saw an old person, or a place where an old person might live, he'd stop and ask, "Did you know Muddy Waters?"

Sometimes, he got lucky.

"One lady told me a story about Muddy's dad (Ollie Morganfield) being hired to play on Christmas," Gordon says. "All that stuff, the stories I found, was just genius. I'm sure that I was getting things that are going to be taken from the Earth when these people pass."

Not all of it. After five years of research and scholarship, Gordon has just published "Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters" (Little, Brown, $25.95). An overview of the bluesman's legacy from his birth in 1913 in Rolling Fork, Miss., to his death in Chicago in 1983, it's a compelling, complete and entertaining discourse on the man Keith Richards called the "codebook" between blues, rock 'n' roll and the other forms of music he had been listening to as a youth in England.

With Mick Jagger, Richards would use one of Waters' songs, "Rollin' Stone," as a symbol of their devotion to the blues. But Waters' influence transcended the effect it had on Jagger and Richards, however important the Rolling Stones became.

"I knew that his story was bigger than a music book," says Gordon, a noted music writer who directed the documentary film "All Day and All Night" that featured B.B. King and Rufus Thomas. "Because he lived the great migration and social change, people who didn't know anything about the blues could connect with him."

Waters - born McKinley Morganfield - was one of the many black Southerners who fled the hard-scrabble life of a sharecropper for the economic promise of the industrial Midwest and north. Like many of his peers who wanted to escape poverty, Waters headed to Chicago. There, he refined the music he had learned in the cotton fields, the songs he had learned and played at "juke joints, frolics, Saturday-night suppers."

In Chicago, Waters electrified his acoustic country blues and became a living legend. His songs — "Mannish Boy," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Just Make Love to Me," "Close to You," among many others — are still considered classics.

It's the lesser known details of Waters' life that fascinate and make Gordon's book so vital. When rock 'n' roll first came to prominence in the mid-1950s, and Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Little Richard began to chart records, blues artists suddenly weren't in demand anymore.

Waters, instead of slogging against the tide, became less of a presence in his own band.

"Muddy began to fashion himself as a band leader, as a Sinatra out there in front of the orchestra," Gordon says. "He felt like the blues in his soul was no longer touching people. He let other, younger guitarists play the licks, thinking they would reach the audience, and Muddy stood in front as the bandleader and the entertainer. During that period he spent as much time in the audience as he did onstage. He was the hospitality guy."

Gordon also chronicles Waters' trips to England, and the resultant resurrection of his career that's often credited to the devotion of then-young British rockers such as Richards, Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Eric Burdon. Others, such as Chris Barber, who fronted a jazz band that fancied Delta blues and backed Waters on his first trip overseas, were just as important.

"Can't Be Satisfied" is far from a sanitized biography. Gordon covers Waters' proclivity for women, and his various infidelities, in depth.

"I look at it as a trail of broken hearts and bridges burned," he says.

Waters, however, was also a giving and caring man. He took care of his children, friends and family, and maintained a relationship with Geneva Wade Morganfield for more than 25 years until she died in 1973.

Then there is his body of music, which speaks for itself.

"It's heart-felt music that transcends time, that's the difference between pop music and blues," Gordon says, noting the ebb and flow in the popularity of the various forms of popular music. "Blues, I think, transcend such whims because of its emotions and the humanity upon which it's built … This is a sound that comes from the human soul, and it will always have an audience."

Just getting into Muddy Waters• Gordon recommends the following albums as essential and good starting points.