It’s funny that when we learn about the civil rights movement and Jim Crow era in high school we never really delve into the absolute cruelty and inhumanity of it all. It’s very glossed over and that’s almost equally disturbing. We as a society, and specifically we as white people I think, like to try and forget the things we did or the things our relatives did.
Given the extent of segregation in the south as well as the spectacle lynching’s it’s no surprise that black Americans began migrating north in large numbers. The north may not have been particularly welcoming but I imagine that it would have been hard to find a place worse than the south at that time. The more integrated environment surely had a hand in integrating the production of music, even if it wasn’t publicly integrated.
The urbanization of the black experience coincided with the origination of folklore and folk music in the United States. Folklorists Lomax and Work traveled around the country searching for, what they believed to be, the genuine sound of un-commercialized America. During their search the found Muddy Waters, an African-American sharecropper and musician. Lomax described Waters sound as “unwashed and uncleaned” and thought of him as the voice of the African American folk movement. In actuality Waters had been exposed to pop culture and played a myriad of music including pop hits. The idea of an untouched, pure rural sound was fantasy.

Muddy Waters eventually moved to Chicago and continued playing music. Over time his sound did change. This change is apparent in the difference between “I be’s troubled” and “I can’t be satisfied”. At their roots the two songs are the same however they sound worlds apart. “I be’s troubled” was recorded first and embodied the “unwashed” sound that Lomax talked about; even the name, “I be’s troubled”, spoke of a more rural uneducated sound. “I can’t be satisfied” has a much cleaner more put together sound. It appealed to a more urban crowd. Waters built his career in Chicago by repackaging southern nostalgia for recently migrated black Americans. “I can’t be satisfied” is a perfect example of that