Muddy Waters: Can't Be Satisfied (review)

Any person remotely interested in studying the history of grassroots American music will inevitably end up listening to the blues, and when listening to the blues, that individual will at some point end up listening to Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters: Can't Be Satisfied allows the viewer to enter the world of this seminal figure in American music. The film is a companion to co-director Robert Gordon's authoritative biography Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (2003).

A wide variety of important figures from the musical world testify throughout the film to the importance, influence, and undeniable power of Muddy Waters and his music. B.B. King, another critically important figure in blues history, calls Waters the "godfather of the blues", and states that "Muddy was singing when I was still plowin'." Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones muses that "there's a dead place in us all" that Waters' music represents, while Bonnie Raitt, testifies that Waters was, without a doubt, "the most sexy bluesman ever." On a personal level, however, this musical icon led a difficult, complex life – several ex-band members discuss Waters' preferences for young women, while his granddaughter recalls the difficult relationship that Waters had with his wife, concluding that he was "as much of a family man as he could be."

Students of the blues will probably already be familiar with much of the story of Waters' life described in this film, but for those unfamiliar with the bluesman's story, the film supplies ample background material, from his early years in the Mississippi delta, playing music on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale, to his discovery by Library of Congress archivist and folklorist, Alan Lomax, in 1941. Lomax went on to make the first recordings of Waters' music (those "plantation recordings" are still essential recordings for anyone interested in the blues).

In 1943 Muddy Waters joined the legions of southern blacks that migrated to the north in the pre-war and World War II era. Waters ended up in Chicago, where he got a job in a paper factory, and began to play his music at house parties and small clubs. Waters and others transformed the acoustic blues they had played in the south into a more electrified, up-tempo brand of blues, and eventually, Waters' music became the personification of the new "urban blues". In 1950, Leonard Chess, an immigrant from Poland, founded Chess Records. One of the first artists Chess signed was Muddy Waters. During his years with Chess, Waters grew to become the most influential blues figure in Chicago, and beyond, introducing young music fans from all over the world to Chicago blues. Many, like the young Keith Richard, Bill Wyman, and Mick Jagger, came to revere Waters and through him, other American bluesmen. His legacy continued, as many of the first songs performed by the Rolling Stones were Muddy Waters covers. Waters also played a role in introducing the blues to a wider white audience in America when he performed in 1960 at Newport. But at the same time, the film complicates Waters' relationship with Chess and other paternalistic whites who have played a role in his life – musician Jim Dickinson relates that, in Waters' mind, Chess, Lomax, and the plantation owner at Stovall were essentially all the same "white devil."

As the film continues through its historical trajectory, blues historian Ron Wynn notes that the rock 'n roll and the social changes of the 1960s were the worst things that could have happened to the blues and to Muddy Waters. Several classic blues clubs in Chicago turned to rock-and-roll, and many African-Americans felt that the blues was a musical reminder of a regrettable past that would be better off forgotten. Blues audiences in the 1960s became increasingly whiter and more mainstream, but this popular recognition led to a significant blues revival in the 1970s that reinvigorated Waters' career, allowing him to release a string of popular albums before...