"Muddy Waters was barefoot when he got word a white man was looking for him. It was Sunday, the last day of August, 1941. The cotton had bloomed and was set, the crop as it would be until picked in about a month. Muddy, like the other blacks who farmed a piece of someone else's land in Mississippi, was enjoying his lay-by. Soon, he'd be working that cotton from sun to sun.".

"Word reached Muddy before the white man did. "Uh-oh! This is it," Muddy remembered thinking. "They done found out I'm sellin' whiskey."" "The white man was not a tax agent or the law. He was a young fellow named Alan Lomax, and his recordings of Muddy - the first ever made - would launch the career of McKinley A. Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, rocketing him from farmhand to musical legend.".

"As Robert Gordon details in Can't Be Satisfied, Muddy Waters invented electric blues and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle. Gordon excavates Muddy's mysterious past and early career, taking us from Mississippi fields to postwar Chicago street corners. We meet the men and women who surrounded Muddy, riding shotgun with him as his style evolves.

On the journey, we get a primer on blues, including an introduction to the other essential musicians who shaped this bedrock of modern culture. Gordon evokes the creative process and takes us in the studio and on the road with Muddy's band as they drive across the South, guns in their laps, whiskey and champagne on their breath, no streetlight in sight. From a tangle of midnight, smoke, sweat, and deep genius, Robert Gordon re-creates the skin and soul of this American giant."--BOOK JACKET.