he would crawl around on all fours, howling like a wolf on the prowl

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Besman did not even expect Hooker to perform the blues — not by any traditional definition of blues music. Instead, he let the guitarist riff on a single chord while improvising a narrative. These weren’t even songs, just freewheeling grooves, without a clear beginning, middle, or end. They concluded after around three minutes each, but that was imposed by the limitations of a 78rpm record. Directing Hooker in the studio was not like producing other acts. Most bands arrive at a session prepared to play well-rehearsed material which they refine into polished, finished performances. Not so for Hooker: a second take would produce, likely as not, a substantially different song. Methodical production would never have worked for the young John Lee Hooker. He would have covered the whole history of the blues in twenty takes, and be no closer to a definitive version of a specific song. Besman didn’t want polished performances; he wanted to capture the heat of the moment. He went with the flow, and if take two sounded like a different song, Besman simply assigned it a separate title.

I’m gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won’t have to work

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Prohibition notwithstanding, Paramount made accommodations for the musicians’ taste for whiskey. The studio paid a young woman who worked as a waitress in the hotel next door where the musicians were lodged to ferry drinks to the studio. As House recalled, the whiskey was used as an incentive to expedite the recording process: “Anytime that you end a piece, when you end it she’s right there with cups about that high. With your whiskey—that old, real good dark whiskey, smell good, taste good, and make you so high you rock like a rockin’ chair. She’d be standing right there, waiting for you to come and get it. And the other guy want to hurry up and get to play his piece so he can get his.”  The result according to House was predictable: “All of us would be high as a Georgia pine.” Laibley himself would sometimes have white hillbilly musicians, who after all also hailed from areas where stills were common, bring him “mountain dew” when they came to Grafton

the days when jazz and sex were practically inseparable

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“Any time I got broke, in a sporting house I would go,” said Morton, and the best houses clamored for his services. He even worked for Emma Johnson’s Circus House, where naked dances and sex acts were performed, close up, for paying customers—a distinctly New Orleans brand of theatrical entertainment. While the erotic acts progressed, Morton played music to match, both setting the tempo and following it. He usually worked from behind a screen, but to get around this impediment, Morton often cut a hole at eye level with a pocket knife, so he could ogle the action while his fingers stroked the keys. The ambience inspired a red-hot music, which became still more brilliant and rhythmically free at the Frenchman’s, an after-hours saloon nearby, at the corner of Bienville and Villere. After working the brothels or catching cornetist Joe Oliver at the Big 25 (at Franklin and Iberville) or hoisting a few at Billy Phillips’s place (around the corner from Tom Anderson’s), the New Orleans professors headed for the Frenchman’s. They started filtering in at about 4 A.M., ready to blow off steam after a long night’s work. This was where they gambled, drank, took turns at the piano, and tried to cut each other with their newest and flashiest keyboard repertoire. More than at the brothels, where the piano men played for money, here they played for each other. Music lovers, insomniacs, and late-night women swarmed the place, a hothouse for a newly emerging sound that still had no particular name, except for “New Orleans music.” In the front room, a bar and nearby piano kept spirits high, while a table in the back room accommodated food, drink, and cards. Morton went so far as to call this “the place where jazz originated,” the birth of an art form attended by whores dripping diamonds and delivered by bone-tired musicians stoking up with a toot of cocaine or winding down with a pinch of heroin.

"Well, he played Harp, I don't know nothin' 'bout no Monica"

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The lawyer's comment was that if the McTell monies were substantial - "large enough to attract attention if word gets out - which it would if they had to pay them over to the state," and, if Peer hadn't paid anyone on the account for decades - "Probably since McTell's death in 1959 and maybe even before that," - then "this combination could be a professional black eye to Peer; indicating they couldn't be bothered finding someone they owed lots of money to. That's not the kind of attention to detail that potential co-publishers are looking for. Add in the obvious racial overtones and the cultural importance of McTell's work, and you have a nasty publicity problem for Peer."

Gutbucket blues were growling on the jukebox

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They played almost every night in one of the thousands of little bars and clubs where the black working class had its fun. The hours were very long indeed. Muddy remembered: "Mostly we had a late hour license three and four and five o'clock in the morning. On Saturday night go to about five. Summertime it was daybreak. Go in there in the day and leave in the day ­ next day." And they had to play hard and loud to get a hearing, because, true to black tradition, everybody present felt free to talk, shout, whoop, holler, laugh, quarrel, dance, fight, maybe all at the same time, but never remain passive and silent. Muddy had to change his style to cope with this problem.

When I went into the clubs, the first thing I wanted was an amplifier. Couldn't nobody hear you with an acoustic. Wherever you've got booze, you're going to get a little fight. You get more of a pure thing out of an acoustic, but you get more noise out of an amplifier.

Thus Muddy began to build the big sound into the blues. He learned to stay tight on mike and make the loudspeakers shout and groan over his crying guitar, with the rhythm guitar pumping the bass in the background. Soon an amplified harmonica joined him center stage, not moaning softly in the background but pressed against the microphone; it shrilled, howled, and baahed like a musical windstorm. Muddy felt good.

The whole shack quivered and boomed with this rhythm

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