By 1954, rocknroll looked ready to plow blues under and suddenly, by 1960, it was over. The deaths of Richie Valens, Big Bopper and Buddy Holly the previous year, Chuck Berry being sent to jail, Little Richard becoming a preacher, and Elvis going into the army derailed rocknroll. Ray Charles and Fats Domino crossed over into country. In addition, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley had all fled America for the greener pastures of Britain. Cochran would die in England later that year. To top it off, payola was declared to be illegal that year and it ruined Alan Freed, the man credited with starting the whole rocknroll craze in 1951. All that was left of rocknroll were lightweight entertainers making huge amounts of cash by covering the songs of black artists (in a nice, clean way, of course) who weren’t permitted to be broadcast on the same stations where their pale imitators were making killings off their material. That’s what it had come down to. What began with so much aggressive promise ended in a flat whimper.
Blues seized the moment to jump back into the spotlight. Blues revivals became all the rage in the early 60s. Son House, Skip James, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt and others were playing the old blues to new, enthralled audiences of young white kids. Some bluesmen, as Hurt and James, enjoyed a popularity at the revivals that eluded them when they recorded decades earlier mostly because of the Depression. Electric blues too was enjoying a rebirth with such artists as Otis Rush, Buddy Guy and T-Bone Walker enjoying revived careers—this time with an adoring white audience who hung on their every note while new bluesmen as Jimi Hendrix were arriving on the scene.
Muddy and the Chess Records executives were not about to let this bit of good fortune slip by. Suddenly, young white people, many of them disaffected rocknrollers, constituted the majority of the blues fans at every show. Muddy was a bit unnerved by it. He had grown up not really trusting white people—they always wanted something from him without ever giving him anything in return for it but trouble. At a place called Smitty’s Corner, three white men kept turning up at every show and made Muddy very suspicious. “Goddamn, they come to get me,” said Muddy. “That’s got to be them.” He meant the IRS because he owed taxes. Even white people got
screwed over by the IRS, a black man had no chance. Muddy would hide backstage after his sets to avoid the men. The men’s names were Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop and Nick Gravenites and they had nothing to do with the IRS and everything to do with the music business and they idolized Muddy.
When Muddy finally heard music from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he heard his own music. When he heard the English bands as Cream and Led Zeppelin, he heard his own music. Even Elvis was getting in on the act with his song “Trouble” from the movie King Creole, which blatantly used the beat from “Hoochie Coochie Man” and Muddy realized that white folks were not just fans, they were now imitating him in earnest. It wasn’t some affectation they were assuming, it was now their identity, they had embraced and internalized the blues. The new crop of bluesmen were becoming more and more white. They weren’t greenhorn hacks anymore, they were becoming serious competition. They had a deeper love and understanding of blues than an increasing number of blacks in the same age group who were now turning away from it and Muddy knew he’d better watch out.
By 1968, Waters and the Chess label did some experimenting with his Delta sound and came up with Electric Mud, which featured songs as “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy” done up with rock effects and production values. It sold very well initially until critics attacked it as a blatant attempt to make Muddy into an unconvincing hippy and cash in on the naïveté of young fans. While Muddy was aiming at the hippies with the album to bring a new audience into blues, the album certainly didn’t make Muddy into a hippy but simply made him more accessible to them. But the critics won the day and poisoned the album and sales of Electric Mud all but stopped. Today, the album is recognized as an evolution in electric blues but, soured by the experience of watching critics destroy the work, Muddy pronounced Electric Mud to be “dogs-hit” despite the fact that Jimi Hendrix loved it.
