The Birth of Muddy Willie

#575 / Flood Time Capsule: 2011

It all began on a winter’s night in 2009. The band was waiting to go on stage for a show, and to keep their fingers limbered up, Charlie Bowen, Jacob Scarr and Doug Chaffin starting jamming a bit.

Bowen and Chaffin had an ulterior motive. Because 15-year-old Scarr was becoming the newest — and youngest-ever — member of The Flood, they were looking for a signature tune that the band could play whenever it wanted to showcase the young man’s formative guitar chops.

“Hoochie Coochie Man”

A blues was a natural choice, of course, and that had Charlie thinking about Muddy Waters’ classic “Hoochie Coochie Man.” A key feature of that song is its use of “stop time,” a term for pauses in the music as commonly heard in traditional New Orleans jazz, which would allow Jacob to stretch out on a series of improvised fills between each verse.

Willie Dixon wrote the song in 1954 and pitched it to Waters during an intermission at Chicago’s Club Zanzibar. The band learned it quickly enough to perform it that very night.

With lyrics featuring heavy braggadocio and references to hoodoo folk magic — like a “black cat bone” and a “mojo tooth” to fulfill a gypsy woman’s prophecy about the narrator’s supreme appeal — the song became Waters’ biggest hit. It spent 13 weeks on the charts, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Rhythm & Blues Juke Box chart.

Today, it is a Grammy Hall of Fame track and is preserved in the National Recording Registry.

“Seventh Son”

Of course, The Flood being The Flood, the guys couldn’t leave it at that. After all, they already had a near-40-year tradition of tweaking the tunes they do, so why stop now?

As Charlie started honing the lyrics, he thought about how paternal he and the other old boys in the band felt toward Jacob — whom they had already started calling “Youngblood” — and those thoughts led Bowen to ponder another Willie Dixon composition.

A year after “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Dixon wrote “The Seventh Son,” again drawing on folklore. In the deep South — Dixon was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1915 — a family’s seventh child (especially the seventh son of a seventh son) was believed to be born for good luck, even possessing extra wisdom and knowledge to influence others.

The song was first recorded in Chicago by Willie Mabon and released as a single by Chess Records. It got another ride in 1959 when jazz pianist Mose Allison released his own rendition as a single, but it didn’t achieved its greatest commercial success until a decade after its creation when Johnny Rivers recorded it in 1965.

Anyway, saluting Jacob’s new status as the youngest member of the Family Flood, Charlie incorporated a shout-out to “the seventh son” in his version of the lyrics for “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Debut

All of this brings us to the song’s first video appearance in The Flood oeuvre. It was a March evening 15 years ago this week. The band had moved its weekly Flood rehearsal from the Bowen Bower to the Barboursville clubhouse of the Wyngate Senior Living Community where Flood fans Norman and Shirley Davis had just moved.

As reported here earlier, Norm and Shirley were longtime classical and opera music fans before Rose Riter introduced them to the Flood’s peculiar genre two years earlier, and after that they rarely missed their weekly Flood fix.

That night the guys arrived to find the Wyngate clubhouse was very nice, with wonderful acoustics. Norm had already rearranged the furniture. For the fun evening, about 30 of the Davises’ new neighbors were in the audience, among them Jacob’s grandparents who were also new Wyngate residents.

Pamela Bowen shot video of the evening with her new FlipVideo camera, including this debut of Jacob’s showcase tune:

Later that year, the song was among those recorded at that marathon session at Bud Carroll’s studio that would lead to the Wade in the Water album. Here’s that studio recording (complete with a Sam St. Clair’s solo harmonica on the second chorus):

New Name

Meanwhile, The Flood’s fooling with the tune wasn’t quite don’t yet. The late Dave Peyton, who has been on the sidelines watching this story unfold, decided the song needed a new name.

After all, it was no longer “Hoochie Cootchie Man” and it never had been “Seventh Son.” Since the song had become a mashup of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters’ work, Dave figured the title ought to reflect both. Voila! “Muddy Willie” was born.

That rebranding was revealed a year later during this performance of the song at a stop on the Joe Dobbs Book Tour at Huntington’s Heritage Station, as illustrated in Pamela’s video from that day:

More from Jacob?

Meanwhile, if all this has you eager for more vintage Jacob Scarr solos, drop into the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and tune in the Jacob Channel.

Or just click here to take the express lane.